Someone lost a radioactive capsule. Someone blundered. I shuddered at the news, because if I had been transporting that tiny object for Rio Tinto in Australia, that someone would have been me. I’m an accomplished loser of things. I may have lost more stuff than I ever had in the first place. This ought not to be possible, but if anyone can make it possible, it’s me. Still – losing a radioactive capsule. Wow. This sets a new benchmark among us useless, butter-fingered, forgetful, careless incompetents. I’m almost jealous, annoyed it wasn’t me. At least I’d then know I could never lose anything as important as this again.
I leave things in pubs, restaurants, football grounds, airports, aircraft, taxis, buses, tubes and, on one occasion, a dodgem at a fair in Swansea. When I played golf, I’d obviously lose balls. On the only occasion I didn’t lose a ball, I lost a club. Another time I drove off after my round without my golf bag. At home I can’t find things that I had in my hand only moments before. It is terrifying when this happens; they could be anywhere. I know this, because more than once I’ve found that I absent-mindedly dropped my car key in the bin, while on another occasion my wallet turned up in the bottom drawer of the fridge. I frequently put important things away somewhere safe, where no one will find them – including me, because I forget where the safe place was. Some things never ever turn up again.
But sometimes they do. And herein lies the joy to be found amid this life-shortening, enervating misery: the sheer rush of relief and happiness when you find the missing thing. Be it the car key that eludes me for a minute or two, or the potato masher I’ve not seen for a year and a day, the joy is very real. The more important the thing and the longer it’s missing for, the greater the dopamine hit when it turns up.
Now the capsule has been found, how I envy whoever it was who lost it. How I pity those people who never lose things: they know not the joy of recovery. ’Tis better to have loved and lost and found again, than never to have lost the bloody thing in the first place.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
