Step aside, the Brothers Grimm.  Here is a cautionary tale which at a stroke will turn your blood to ice.  I had intended to spare you the utter horror, gentle readers, until therapy had helped me come to terms with the total dreadfulness of the last few weeks but you demanded news, sadly compassion is way too draining to last for long and so HERE IT IS!

Mindful as ever of the Biblical tale of the wise virgins, I never leave home with all my credit, membership and store loyalty cards, motivated not so much by good sense as by the collective weight of them.  They are kept in a blue makeup bag on my dressing table and selected on a daily basis for the honour of a transfer to my very lovely Hermes wallet and the prospect of a trip out.

I would ask you to imagine the cold, blind, heart-stopping panic when that bag went missing if I didn’t think it might lead to more than a few heart attacks. (I tend to attract an older profile of reader, to say the least).  It was on a par with losing your only child at Oxford Circus station in the week before Christmas. But worse. Far, far worse.

First there is disbelief.  It must be in the room; it never leaves the room.  Then you recall the massive house tidyings that have preceded various social occasions and suspect you might have shoved it into a drawer or cupboard along with armfuls of other junk that all too clearly indicated that your devotion to the minimalism of Marie Kondo has suffered a recent slippage.  Certainly don’t want visitors knowing that, after all your preaching.

I went through every single nook and cranny of that room – followed by the entire house – at least twice.  On the plus side I discovered masses of things that had slipped off the radar and at least one pair of shoes (possibly two) that I have no memory of purchasing.  Result!  But of the cards, nothing.  Even the usual praying to St Anthony of Padua failed.

Breathing deeply into a paper bag on day three I started the Everest-high task of replacing them, starting with my driving licence.  Being a child of the times I googled DVLA lost driving licence and filled in the application form.  There were about five or six hundred pages and required details like your passport number if you wanted them to use the same photograph.  It was only in the clear light of the next morning that I began to have doubts, especially about the cost of replacement, £77.60, which seemed a. An odd amount and b. Expensive for a plastic card, swiftly confirmed by Younger Son, that this was not the actual DVLA website.

There followed an hysterical phone call to the passport office at 10pm on Sunday night where a disinterested official assured me that no-one could get a duplicate of my passport.  I referred him, possibly brusquely, to the experience of Elder Son who has managed to replace his lost documents five times with next to no evidence, twice in foreign countries.  I then phoned the bank to cancel my sole remaining credit card which I had used on the “DVLA” application.

In the morning I rang the DVLA (A top way to pass the time if you have three or four hours with nothing else to do and no drying paint that needs watching) where another bored official told me that this happens all the time and these website are not total scams devoted to selling your identity to people traffickers, that’s probably just a side-line, they merely charge you for the bother of applying on your behalf and apparently that’s not actually illegal.  Well it jolly well should be.

Next on the to-do list was an attempt to remember all the other cards that needed replacing but my advice if this ever happens to you is DO NOT attempt to do this on-line.  That way lies madness and broken iPads.   Either phone or do it in person.  I won’t go through all of them but a prize for sheer incompetence must go to the girl at the Museums Association who, on being informed that I had lost my membership card, asked ‘Membership of what?’  First day, sweetie?

I hope this goes some way to explaining the absence of a blog, it being hard to type when you are heavily sedated in a padded room and I haven’t even mentioned having to commit a little light breaking and entering aided and abetted by my friend Elizabeth.  That is a story for another day, perhaps even within our lifetime.