There have been things going missing

I was beginning to wonder if we had a smoking, literate magpie in the house as well as rats, flies and ants. (Ok, the flies have been vanquished, the ants will shortly be dealt with in a decidedly non-green way and the rat hasn't been seen hide nor hair nor droppings of since the first evening but it's more entertaining to imagine a house seething with uncontained vermin than a merely untidy one).

First my turquoise pen went missing, then several cigarette lighters and finally, this morning, my tobacco pouch.
After a quick search of all the places I might have left it (though I know exactly where I did leave it but one wonders, often, at my age, whether one is 'losing it' yet*) I became convinced of the guilt of a certain person and stormed the office...leaving my glasses behind me. The office (Barney's sanctuary and smoking corner) yielded nothing.
I began a fruitless and increasingly outraged search of the house, cursing my memory, my failure to put things where I know I can find them next time I want them and the fact that I now couldn't find my glasses either! After stamping around for a while, I put on my driving glasses, found my middle distance glasses, and then tried again in the office...where I found my turquoise pen, (broken) 3 lighters and, of course, my tobacco pouch, cunningly concealed on a shelf where such things as tobacco pouches are not usually kept.
There are times when one suddenly feels that husbands are BAD people.
Not because of the casual borrowing...not even because of the (unintentional) breakages and concealments but because dammit, I wasted half an hour searching for something which I had left where I could find it and I hadn't foolishly mislaid my turquoise pen or my 3 lighters.
When I was little, I used to lose things, precious things, inconvenient things, all the time. There was a terrible occasion when Mummy and Daddy and I had to drive to the lost property office in London because I'd left my school satchel on the bus. The time I lost Muffin the Mule 'somewhere on the golf course'. The beloved and irreplaceable book I was reading during the French lesson and which no one ever returned. the blue plastic ring which looked good with everything and which I left by the wash basin in the toilet at work (what sort of a shit colleague pinches a ring from the toilet at work?).
This habit of losing things whether I might care about them or not instilled in me a sense of deep anxiety about my ability to keep anything I cared about...the losses seemed so random as if my head had temporarily developed a blind spot (it's possible, I suppose that I had a touch of ADD, can you have a touch of that?) and as a result I've developed a few odd habits, like when I'm out I hold my lighter all the time (all nice and warm in my hand) because if I put it on the table either someone will absent mindedly walk off with it or I will absentmindedly walk of without it. And I feel slightly hysterical with rage if someone takes a pen from the pen place and leaves it in the other room. And I often buy two identical pens or a dozen identical lighters in case I find myself deprived. Oh and if I lend someone a pen I surreptitiously watch them like a hawk until I get it back safe.
Anyway after 40 odd years I finally learnt to keep things in their places and pick them up before going away without them (mostly - when we're travelling I get a bit itchy if I have to put my bag down in case I forget to pick it up again because it could still happen) but it does mean I have to set up little practice rituals to make sure that I always put the glasses in one place and the pens in another and the keys in another. And if I put them there it does something terrible to my psyche when some other agent takes them away!
So this evening I told Barney he mustn't borrow my tobacco unless he's going to leave it where I can easily find it and picked up my lighter ostentatiously from the sitting room mantelpiece and added "and you broke my turquoise pen". He looked suitably chastened but he doesn't really understand!
My life would be so much easier if I became Sunnyasi** like the Hindus (?) and owned nothing at all.
Bampton Church, a sunny day in November
St Mary's Marlston on a grey day in December

*because of my chronic absentmindedness I find this euphemism for senility particularly worrying :) I'd hate to lose 'it' among all the other valuable stuff I've lost over the years.
**Say what you like about Rudyard Kipling, he wrote a mean bit of prose.
Extract from 'the Second Jungle Book' concerning one Purun Dass who became Sunnyasi.

Next month, when the city had returned to its sunbaked quiet, he did a thing no Englishman would have dreamed of doing; for, so far as the world’s affairs went, he died. The jewelled order of his knighthood went back to the Indian Government, and a new Prime Minister was appointed to the charge of affairs, and a great game of General Post began in all the subordinate appointments. The priests knew what had happened, and the people guessed; but India is the one place in the world where a man can do as he pleases and nobody asks why; and the fact that Dewan Sir Purun Dass, K. C. I. E., had resigned position, palace, and power, and taken up the begging-bowl and ochre-coloured dress of a Sunnyasi, or holy man, was considered nothing extraordinary. He had been, as the Old Law recommends, twenty years a youth, twenty years a fighter, — though he had never carried a weapon in his life, — and twenty years head of a household. He had used his wealth and his power for what he knew both to be worth; he had taken honour when it came his way; he had seen men and cities far and near, and men and cities had stood up and honoured him. Now he would let these things go, as a man drops the cloak he no longer needs.

Behind him, as he walked through the city gates, an antelope skin and brass-handled crutch under his arm, and a begging-bowl of polished brown coco-de-mer in his hand, barefoot, alone, with eyes cast on the ground — behind him they were firing salutes from the bastions in honour of his happy successor. Purun Dass nodded. All that life was ended; and he bore it no more ill-will or good-will than a man bears to a colourless dream of the night. He was a Sunnyasi — a houseless, wandering mendicant, depending on his neighbours for his daily bread; and so long as there is a morsel to divide in India, neither priest nor beggar starves. He had never in his life tasted meat, and very seldom eaten even fish. A five-pound note would have covered his personal expenses for food through any one of the many years in which he had been absolute master of millions of money. Even when he was being lionized in London he held before him his dream of peace and quiet — the long, white, dusty Indian road, printed all over with bare feet, the incessant, slow-moving traffic, and the sharp-smelling wood smoke curling up under the fig-trees in the twilight, where the wayfarers sit at their evening meal.

When the time came to make that dream true the Prime Minister took the proper steps, and in three days you might more easily have found a bubble in the trough of the long Atlantic seas than Purun Dass among the roving, gathering, separating millions of India

Kipling saw a very different India than the one we think of today.