Months and months ago, when the writing retreats (first one this weekend, eeeeeeeek!) were less than a twinkle in my proverbial eye (this must have been before the bikini panic episode that sparked the whole thing off, more on that another time), I was looking online for writerly types in London.

I was lonely, you see, and wanted to know I wasn’t the only person scared of writing. I found a couple of blogs, one of which led me to Caroline Smailes (see link to the left) and In Search of Adam. Her story is inspiring and helped me to continue writing, and I love her blog because I am a complete nosy parker and she is – or appears to be, because I suppose the blog persona is always going to be a constructed narrator – endearingly honest.

I ordered one of the first copies of In Search of Adam, signed by the author. It arrived in a greyish jiffy bag, and I stored it under my desk until I had a handbag big enough to take it home in. I left it in the jiffy bag because I’ve become bizarrely precious about first editions recently and wanted to take care of it. Since when did books become about money rather than things to love and use? Ahem, I am guessing about the time I found out how much the Philip Pullman I picked up cheap on ebay would have gone for if it had been properly described.

Anyway, in some sort of twisted book-karma payback for loving the object and not its story, my book has gone missing. I don’t know if I threw it out when I left my old job, or if I thought it was an empty jiffy and put it in the bin at home. This makes me sad. I haven’t even read it! I am clinging to the vain hope that I stored it somewhere safe where I wouldn’t throw it away or lose it. I am well known for doing this, then forgetting what I’ve done with the object in question, most memorably with a bottle of M&S peach talc for my sister’s christmas present when I was 7. She received it the next December after finding it behind the dining room curtains 9 months after Christmas.

So I am now officially in search of In Search of Adam.