I HAD LOOKED LITERALLY EVERYWHERE

A few months ago I started looking for a small, green photo album that I used to keep happening upon every time I was busy looking for something else. It is a battered little keepsake with just the slight decorative touch of an art deco sunshine motif on the cover in gold. I searched the house from top to bottom and became more and more obsessed with finding it, believing it to be the only album that had a picture in it of an old lacquered cabinet which my grandparents used to own. Why this was a particular need at that moment does, rather naturally, escape me now, but suffice to say, finding that album became a tiny bit of an obsession for slightly longer than could really be considered rational.

Anyway, it never turned up and I reluctantly turned my thoughts to other things, although, whenever some other item pinged into my subconscious and had to be tracked down, I would remember the album and hope ever-so-slightly that this might be the search when it chose to show up instead. The rest of the time the memory of that failed search did kind of linger at the back of my mind even though I was trying to forget all about it.

Sometimes, though, when I’ve failed to find something specific, I don’t want to forget about it, and sometimes I do forget about it when I shouldn’t. Which is why pages of my work notebooks, or the occasional fading post-it note, still stuck to some surface or other around the place, will have the word “FIND” written in the closest thing that I can do to neat handwriting, and have a rather bizarrely described and quite obscure item (or - more usually - a short list) written beneath it.

Months passed and another passing thought sprang to mind recently, and that wretched album suddenly became something I was determined to track down. This was inevitably getting rather silly, but, on a recent Sunday morning, before the rest of the universe stirred, I spent more than two hours moving books off shelves and opening old storage boxes full of once strangely vital-seeming tat, and all to no avail. The flippin’ thing was just nowhere to be found.

I had quite pretty much turned the the contents of the house upside down looking for the blessed thing and had now (I thought...) looked quite literally everywhere I could think of where it might possibly be, and all of those places where my memory imagined that I thought that I might once have seen it, but that little green book was just not willing to be tracked down. It had gone, and I resigned myself that it was probably lost forever…

Ironically, of course, on other days, during other hunts for other objects, it used to turn up all the time. I used to keep finding it and being distracted by it, bathing in the warm glow of nostalgia for a few minutes instead of getting on with the task in hand. It’s not a comprehensive album, in fact I think it might only contain half a dozen or so pictures taken on a Christmas morning when I was about four years old, but by now the thing itself had become irrelevant, it was only the finding of it that mattered.

At one point, against all my rational judgement, I even descended to wildest superstition and called upon St Anthony all to no avail. I knew that I had obviously put it somewhere specific so I would know where it was, quite possibly because I kept on finding it during my other quests and decided that I liked the nostalgic moment it manifested so much that this was something that I should have easily available to me “close to hand”. Sometimes I even convinced myself that, using the theory of hiding things in plain sight, I was probably looking right at it but I just couldn’t see it.

Wild scenarios started to form in the mind. It must have got put into that box of stuff we sorted and took to the charity shop a couple of years ago, or it wasn’t even at this house I was looking at it, or perhaps I had imagined the whole thing and it never even really existed in the first place.

The other thing is that I had convinced myself that the thing was going to turn out to have been within arms reach of me whilst I was sitting right here. I must have sat here, spinning the chair around for quite a while trying to will that particular nonsensical idea to be truthful. I think that I just had that feeling of brewing inevitable irony…

Eventually, I had to give up. Even the tried and trusted techniques of finding it when I’ve been looking for something else entirely, or forgetting about it all together for a while had failed to make this particular object manifest itself…

Oh, there it is…

No, just kidding…

Defeated, and with the wee small hours of Sunday all burning away, I gave up, and set about my normal Sunday morning chores with a slight air of despond. Over a cup of reviving tea, I admitted to the beloved about what I had done with those early morning hours, and tried to convince her that the charity box had accidentally scoffed the thing and transported it to some other place forever. She was having none of it, convinced that it would be in that dark corner behind the TV where she was sure she had last seen it. I, of course, had searched that area with my own toothless equivalent of a fine-toothed comb on many previous occasions during my previous hunting trips and was dubious, but, as the toast was browning in the toaster I went for one last look and found it within thirty seconds with a resounding astonished mutter of “You son of a b…” being directed at it as it amazingly sat in my hand once again.

Oddly, now that I have found it, I am struggling remember why an image of that cabinet, the reason that I started to look for it in the first place, was so important at the time. In the meantime, whilst I dredge the darkest corners of my memory to work out that little gem, I’ll have to find somewhere safe to keep the album, and I am in absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the whole sorry madness will start again the next time I think of it…