Now where did I put it ? From Jos Biggs 

They say that you never appreciate something until you don’t have it any more.

Take electricity, for instance: If the electricity goes off for whatever reason have you ever switched on the light so that you can see where the matches are for the candle? I have.

And how come that anything that you have mislaid immediately becomes the one thing you really need – right now!

My latest episode of mislayance concerned my watch. I have several – at a guess probably five. However, only one of them works. This is because only one of them has a battery in it.

The thinking behind this is that five watches need five batteries, all of which will eventually need replacing. The snag is that they will all run out and need new batteries at different times, so I will be back and forth to the watch shop with boring regularity.

This never used to happen with the wind-up watches!

My only functioning watch lives on my dressing table in a little ceramic saucer all of its own. I wore it the day before yesterday, but when I went to put it on today it wasn’t there!

I stopped and thought. I had a distinct memory of standing by the dressing table the day before yesterday taking it off. Furthermore I definitely remember putting it in its saucer. So why wasn’t it there?

I searched high and low in all the places I might have left it. Then I searched high and low. I gave up and decided to sleep on it – maybe it will come to me in a multi-coloured dream.

It didn’t. There was nothing for it but to systematically destruct the house – it has to be in there somewhere!

I’ll do that, but first I’ll have a shower. My towels and I went into the shower room, and there it was – sitting on top of the stand of bathroom cupboards! 

I know that I had worn it since I had last showered two days ago, and as I hadn’t been in the shower room in between, how had it managed to get in there?

There are a couple of plausible answers: A poltergeist had snuck in while I was not looking and had mischievously taken it out of its saucer and put it in the shower room.

Or: I had had extremely discerning burglars who had found nothing worth taking, but had playfully moved my watch.

Or: I had mis-remembered!

Whichever seems to you the most likely answer I fancy the poltergeist theory – it would also explain many other occurrences of mislayance!