We have a fault with the new cooker we bought last year. It’s not a ‘won’t work’ fault, but the fan refuses to turn off, and comes on of its own accord, even when the oven hasn’t been used all day. Just another of life’s little annoyances, add it the list that grows daily. The small niggles that make me so frustrated with modern technology, I am in danger of biting through my bottom lip.

Luckily, it is under guarantee. Just get the receipt that doubles as the guarantee, contact the shop that supplied and fitted it, and off we go.

Hang on. Where did I put that paperwork? Somewhere safe, obviously. A place so secure that not only would I never lose it, I can be sure of never remembering where to find it, if I live to be 100.

My fault of course, not my wife’s. I dealt with the purchase, I paid for it out of my account, so it’s my job to get it sorted.

Funny thing is, whenever she loses or misplaces similar receipts, that’s also my fault. Because I must have moved it. That goes without saying. It was definitely ‘there’, and now it has gone. The only solution is that I moved it for some reason best known only to me, and now I don’t know where it is.

This doesn’t end with receipts for electrical goods, oh no. Instruction books for things bought but never used, they all disappear too. Attachments for things like mixers and vacuum cleaners suddenly remembered, where did we store them? They will never be found. We already know that, as we begin the fruitless search, and tempers rise.

This reasonably small house has very little storage, or free space. But it is nonetheless capable of swallowing up unlimited amounts of crucial paperwork, and rarely used household implements.

Yet we know full well that we stored them ‘here’, or ‘there’. We can remember it as if it was yesterday. Yet they are gone. For ever.

How does this happen? Is it only us? Are we completely careless and thoughtless? And when it happens, why is our first thought to allocate blame, washing our hands of any responsibility for the loss? Why don’t we stick to a simple system? Maybe we should have one big box where all such things go to live.

We would have to rummage through it, and probably tip it out every time we had to find something. But we would rest easy, knowing it would eventually be found in ‘The Box’.

As long as we can remember where we put the box of course.