I am forever losing things these days.

It’s usually the ordinary everyday things such as car keys, my lighter or my pipe.

One of my problems is that I like to keep things in particular places so I can find them when I need them. But when the time comes to need them I can’t find them.

This is as a result of my second problem: I have become very absent minded.

A typical example is when I get an urgent call from Herself to say she has lost her cigarette lighter [which she loses on a frighteningly regular basis] so I hop out of my chair and head for the attic. Somewhere along the way I will put down my pipe but it will be on a subconscious level. So an hour later I reach for the pipe and it isn’t there. So I have to traipse back to the attic searching the kitchen table, the book cases, the mantelpiece and any other spot where I might have left it.

Yesterday afternoon it was a remote control.

I went down to the village earlier to buy some batteries [and a few other things]. Now I remember putting the batteries into the remote so that at least meant I didn’t have to search the car [or the village].

I searched everywhere. Upstairs and downstairs. I moved my chair [fucking heavy] and Herself’s chair [even fucking heavier]. No sign. I ripped the place asunder but there wasn’t a trace. I searched through the recycle bin and having failed there I went through the contents of the kitchen bin [a foul fucking job]. I searched the fridge and the freezer and then all the drawers [full of junk of course] and even checked the bread bin. The Junk Back Room that I am in the process of clearing had several piles of stuff and I searched each pile thoroughly [several times].

Now when I lose something I get twitchy. I can’t relax until I find it. So the searching went on after dark which only highlighted the number of dark places in the house even with all the lights on.

At midnight I decided to call it quits. I wasn’t going to find the fucking yoke and I was exhausted.

I had just one final look around.

I found it.

It was in the Junk Back Room under a box that I had searched under several times. I have no idea how it got there, but there it was. I swear someone [or something] moved it around the place when I wasn’t looking. But there was no one [or nothing] that could have moved it.

I swear this house is haunted.