When the landline rings before eight on a Sunday morning it’s never good news. But both children were home and my parents took leave of this planet a few years back, so it had to be something farther afield. Scrambling my way downstairs, I reached for the phone just as it stopped. Fuming. I grabbed the handset and huffed my hangover back to bed. Then the message light came on and a gruff Scottish man asked if this was the house of Rebecca Bond, and if so, he had something of mine. 

I knew what it was. The night before, I’d arrived home in a taxi only to be mortified that my purse had vacated my bag. The husband was thrilled when I woke him up to bail me out, but I felt sure I’d counted my cash before leaving Sue’s. The caller had been on an early morning cycle and spotted something soggy in the middle of the road, then gone to all the effort of looking me up in an actual telephone directory, having checked my driving license. So when I confirmed the contents, we arranged to swap it for a nice bottle of red later on.  

You might think I’d have been in panic mode, but I have form with losing things so assumed it was probably next to the bananas on Sue's sideboard. I can’t even blame it on hormones because this isn’t a new development. Keys usually turn up in coat pockets the following season, school shoes which have been ‘put somewhere safe over the summer’ in an unmarked carrier bag in an unmarked plastic box in the cellar are stumbled upon by mid-September, and glasses re-appear seemingly unharmed on top of the cistern, in the biscuit tin or wedged in the cup holder of a camping chair.  

Occasionally, my slapdash ways have worked in my favour. For the life of me, I couldn’t find the tent poles to what we lovingly called ‘old blue’, our six-man tunnel which had seen twelve years of drizzly trips in the UK. It was beginning to whiff somewhat with toddler debris and rain-soaked flaps and the last couple of jaunts left us feeling like we we’d lost SAS: Who Dares Wins. After admitting I simply had no idea where the poles could possibly be, we booked a week in a log cabin instead - where I recalled I might have taken them to the tip by accident. 

It’s a lovely surprise when misplaced merchandise re-appears years later; an earring in a cushion cover, a cat box behind the log pile etc... The key is to stop searching. If it wants to be found, it will and it’s never in the last place you thought you had it. Other than the plot, there’s only one thing I’ve lost which I genuinely care about – a tiny diamond from my wedding ring. I’m hopeful it will ‘just turn up’ on a birthday, but I’m more likely to be unwrapping tent poles.