Susie has misplaced an earring - but as for husband Alex...

In our home, I have multiple jobs. Alongside being mother, wife, dog walker and head of family admin, a lot of my “working” day is spent as Chief Searcher for things that are lost.

Mainly this is down to my husband, Alex, whose ability to ‘misplace’ things is legendary. In the BBC Look East newsroom, he’s even - more than once - lost his shoes. Why were the shoes not on his feet, you may ask? It is a question his long-suffering colleagues ask too.

Mostly the search for missing items is an inconvenience rather than anything more vital. But weeks ago I lost an earring that was far more than just a piece of jewellery. It may have been nothing that special to look at - a simple silver swirl - but it was half of a pair that mattered a great deal to me.

These earrings were the last present that my parents chose for me together. They went to a local artisan jewellery shop and bought them for my birthday five years ago.

It was a risk, as I’m not the easiest person to buy for, but I loved them instantly and have worn them endlessly ever since. The fact that they selected them, shortly before my mother’s health declined badly, gives them a sentimental value way beyond their material worth.

So, when one disappeared without trace recently, I felt a powerful mixture of grief and guilt. How could I let that happen? I searched high and low, moved furniture, lifted cushions, alerted family members, checked bags again and again.

And then, yesterday, in a place I swear I’d looked many times, the earring just appeared before my eyes like a mirage. It had been hiding in plain sight. There was no elation, just a wonderful feeling of peace.

It made me think how few belongings are special in their own right - they are imbued with significance because of the memories they hold. When I was asked recently what item I would save in a fire, I instantly said old family photographs – they’re irreplaceable reminders of moments in time.

Alex was very upset when he broke a mug the other day. It had a funny cartoon about parenting on it, and he’d bought it ten years ago when our youngest was born and we had a baby in the house again.

I hadn’t realised its sentimental value, until it emerged he’d spent hours online searching for an identical replacement. He finally found the exact same mug in a small shop in the West Country.

I live in fear of breaking one of the china plates he was given by his grandmother. Again, not valuable, but deeply meaningful. We use them daily (alongside the mishmash of my old student crockery), but at some point one will be dropped and there’ll be tears and recriminations.

Interestingly, despite my mother dying 18 months ago, we’ve not yet done anything with her possessions. My father still lives in the house with everything as it was. At first that was due to lockdown, then it was down to scheduling enough time to do it properly. But it has become very apparent there’s no burning need.

I think my father finds being surrounded by reminders of my mother comforting rather than upsetting. It’s the evidence of 60 happy years together. We are not pretending she’s still here, but she is very much with us in our conversations and our memories. I think losing those physical reminders in the house could be unnecessarily painful.

So, as I ransack our home in the search for my spare car key that’s been missing for months (I’m not casting aspersions, but I think you can guess who last had it), I try to get things in perspective. It may be a pain, or even a problem, that this key is lost. But it is a problem that can be solved one way or another.

I have found my earring, and that is what really matters.