ONE of my most irritating habits, or so people tell me; personally I never realised I had any; is trotting out cliches when it comes to losing, and finding, things. 'Everything has a place and everything in its place,' I say merrily when someone is desperately searching the house for a vital object which they know they put 'there' but has now mysteriously become 'not there'. 'Put everything back where you found it and you'll find it again next time,' I say irritatingly to my granddaughter, so many times that I'm probably lucky not to have become the victim of the grandmother equivalent of matricide. The most annoying thing is that it's true. If you have a specific place for some item of domestic usage then you will never lose it. Not unless someone else carelessly tosses the garlic crusher into the drawer where the knives are kept, or vice versa. I realise I get even more close to being strangled by a member of my dearly beloved family when it comes to keys. Keys in our house have a way of disappearing into a space far more mysterious than the Bermuda Triangle. Not single keys, but whole bunches of them, seem to get up and walk and tuck themselves into unlikely places. Hardly a day goes by that doesn't produce the cry 'have you seen my keys', even from people who seemingly only entered the house with them 30 seconds before. Talk about 'they seek him here they seek him there', the Scarlet Pimpernel was never so sought as half a dozen Yales on a cold and frosty morning. Everyone gets blamed, including the cats, although nobody ever explains why the cats would pick up a bunch of keys and transfer them into the green pot on the back of the window ledge at the back of the sink. When it comes to stress, I would think that key searching comes somewhere at the top of the scale along with death, divorce and moving house. But not me. I can smugly point out that all my keys are on one key ring, that I methodically put them back into my handbag every time I get in and that consequently I always know exactly where they are. Furthermore, I absolutely refuse point blank ever to lend anyone my keys and if they want a new door key cut I accompany them to the place to get it done, like a pop star's bodyguard. On the very few occasions anyone has got hold of my keys, to move the car in or out of the drive for instance, I have had a major panic attack because they have in the space of a few minutes, joined the missing key syndrome in the house and been discovered hanging off a bush somewhere. So, on Tuesday morning, it came as a bit of a shock to discover that I had somehow lost an expensive black jacket belonging to my daughter. I didn't believe it at first. Me, lose something? Moi? Impossible. Earlier that morning my daughter had made an early morning request that I drop off some dry cleaning for her at the cleaner next to my office. As I don't do much conversation in the morning, finding the task of feeding two ravenous cats who haven't eaten for at least eight hours, making a cup of tea and lighting my breakfast, arduous enough. She says she held up two black jackets and a dress and asked me to get them dry cleaned and back in time for Thursday. I must have heard some of it because I remember carrying something hanging on a coat hanger out to the car and carrying it up to the office when I arrived at work. I took them to the cleaners. Later, when she rang to ask when they would be ready she asked how much the jackets would cost. Jackets? There was only one, I told her. Anyway, to cut a long column short, we went through the no there wasn't yes there was conversation and I weakly said that although I didn't remember two there was a possibility that the other one was in the car. But when I checked it wasn't. Like any normal person, who isn't related to George Washington, the man who allegedly never told a lie (wouldn't it be nice if this little trait had been handed down the presidency?), I then began to manufacture scenarios which left any culpability on my part out of the equation. I had never had the jacket. She hadn't actually put the jacket on the hanger. The jacket had slipped off the hanger in the house somewhere. One of the cats had taken the jacket and was now sleeping on it in the airing cupboard. I was going to grimly hang onto my reputation as a person who never loses anything even if it killed me. By the time I had searched the house on Tuesday evening I was, sadly, beginning to believe that somewhere along the line that reputation was going to take a severe knock. Mainly because if I actually believed the jacket had been in the car when I left home then the only place I could have possibly locked it, discounting black jacket thieves, was on the walk up from the car park. A colleague who walked up with me loyally backed my protests that no idiot could possibly have dropped something as noticeable as that in such a short walk, which was nice but, as it turned out, this idiot could. Because, on Wednesday night, as I walked down to the car, I happened to glance at the pay and display machine next to Somerfield and saw something, black, rather pathetic and very, very cold hanging over the back of it. Oh joy, I thought, thanking the lovely honest person who had picked it up. Then I mentally began planning my get out of this one ploy. Should I sneak it into the house and hang it in the shoe cupboard? Or casually drop it in the garage? Or should I blame the cats? In the end of course I had to confess and the owner was so pleased she didn't say a lot at all about foolish mothers and the effects of old age. But she will, oh she will. Probably the next time I mention that if she put the tin opener back on the tin opener's hook then she would be able to open a tin without a major sea, air and land search. So I'll have to keep my mouth shut for a good few many months to come. Now all I have to do is pick up the remaining jacket from the cleaners and get it home without mishap. When it comes to losing things in the house and having to search for them, there are a few benefits because while you're looking you find at least half a dozen things that you thought had gone forever. Thus, while we're on the key search we usually turn up all those lost screwdrivers, scissors, important pieces of paper and, on more than one occasion, that little cache of Christmas cards and paper you bought at the sales just after one Christmas and then couldn't find just before the next one. These things always turn up in January. Come to think of it, I do have to admit that I am just as capable of losing things as anyone else and I did once lose my passport, or as I like to put it, couldn't actually find it. There ensued the usual massive search of just about everywhere there could be in the house for a small red covered booklet to hide. This took the best part of a week and left the house looking as if it had been done over by the FBI. All I managed to find was my late mother's old passport, carefully put away in an envelope. Then, from somewhere, I dredged up a memory of once reading an article which said that you should always get rid of old passports in case they were stolen. An even hazier memory arose of me carefully cutting up and chucking out an old passport belonging to my mother, which had been in the same envelope. Could I possibly have made a mistake and cut mine up? I must have done, because there was no explanation and my punishment was having to fill in a lot of forms and go though the whole rigmarole of having another hideous picture taken etc. I blamed the cats.
