Why our family is a load of losers

There was a young guy walking round Sainsbury’s last Sunday morning who added a touch of culture to the otherwise mundane commercial proceedings.

He was singing, very pleasantly, in a mellow baritone. And the song he sang was Amazing Grace.

As we struggled up and down the aisles in a fruitless search for Ainsley Harriott’s Creamy Vegetable Spelt (don’t ask), his song drifted in and out of earshot, at once uplifting and slightly unnerving.

Prophetic, too, with its references to “lost” and “found”. We’d better change the subject now,  before things get too deep and meaningful.

Especially because, over the last week, the Dixon household has become a veritable Bermuda Triangle of things disappearing and not showing up again.

First it was Mrs D’s reading glasses. She only bought them last Saturday morning, and by that same afternoon they had completely and utterly vanished.

Cue the old joke about needing your specs to find your specs. Or rather don’t, because it didn’t amuse Mrs D at all.

Especially when it transpired, two or three days later and after extensive floor-by-by-floor searches, that she’d dropped them down the front of her apron rather than putting them back into the case, and they’d been  in the pocket ever since.

There have been other episodes too – like the car keys found in a jacket that hadn’t been worn for weeks – but the worst has been the Mystery of the Disappearing Book.

The book in question is Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut. It was meant to complement our already extensive collection of the Vonnegut oeuvre , and it was sitting on the sideboard waiting to be read.

And then it wasn’t.

It had gone, completely and utterly. The searches we conducted for Mrs D’s glasses paled into insignificance compared with the root-and-branch upheaval the house went through looking for Galápagos.

We still haven’t found it, and it looks like we never will. The only rational explanation seems to be that it got recycled with the papers. But with these disappearances becoming more and more irrational by the day, we probably need to look further afield for a reason.

And as regular readers of this column will know, this means blaming the Large Hadron Collider.

Boffins there announced last week that they have nearly found the Higgs Boson, or so-called God Particle. Nearly, but not quite.

Because it’s a well-known fact that the Large Hadron Collider has a mind of its own, and doesn’t want us to find the Higgs Boson, and sends out all sorts of coded warnings whenever anyone gets close.

This time, the warnings are plain for those who choose to read them. There’s a ghost in the machine, and if it wanted humanity to find the Higgs, it wouldn’t have hidden the book, or  the glasses, or the   keys.

Don't mess with the boson. Or, in the words of that hymn:  “The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, The sun forbear to shine”.

You have been warned.