"Well I haven't moved it!"

Where do all the random things in your life disappear to? Those little objects you don’t use all the time, but every so often prove to be essential. They sit around in draws and on shelves for years and invariably when you actually, finally need them they’ve disappeared off the face of the planet.

Big things disappear too, like the days that you intend to use to clean the car and vacuum the cat, but their disappearance is usually easy to trace. I tend to find the solution involves the words ‘arse’ and ‘sit-on’ rather than ‘do’.

But I’m talking about smaller things.

The TV remote is the most obvious one. That tends to be under the sofa. Car keys and (in our case) the removable part of the car radio are also pretty high up the list. Those tend to be in one of Beck’s handbags, but as the content of these bags can also include rotten fruit, scalpels and various other dangerous and/or unpleasant things, I now take the bag to her rather than dive in myself.

The variety of things going missing is getting more interesting. Several years ago we, in a typical moment of indecision, bought two ice-cream scoops - unable to decide in the shop which would be better I lost patience and paid for both. Now both are missing.

This afternoon I fancied brewing some traditional tea. Loose leaves in a pot, not a tea bag flipped into a mug. Having made the tea, I discovered the tea strainer was nowhere to be found.

We’ve been considering converting the lounge into the office/studio, the bedroom into the lounge and the office/studio in the bedroom (because, you know, there’s not enough important stuff to fill our lives). I’m not convinced that all the relevant pieces of furniture will fit in their new homes. We’ve tons of tools (you tend to accumulate these sorts of things if your partner runs around the country building wooden huts) and have previously owned not one, but two, tape measures. Now I want to use one they have both, predictably, vanished.

Even the mice that used to lurk around the kitchen have mysteriously vanished. Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps the mice have been stealing things and have crushed themselves with a phillips-head screwdriver.

No.

That’d just be silly.

(It’s far more likely to have been that talking badger I sat in the garden with yesterday afternoon.)

No, I have my suspicions as to where they might be. I just can’t find the right, tactful, words to broach the subject. I seem to have mislaid the power of effective communication too.