A month or two ago, my rather loved Airking went missing a little bit. At first I was unworried, I have a few too many watches scattered over a few too many boxes in a few too many places. While my beloved knows better than to disturb my complex low entropy storage system she affectionately calls 'that mess', it started to look as if a neatness might have been committed, resulting in the loss of the Rolex.

Eventually I became concerned enough to start working through a few boxes looking for an out of place Air King. Not a sausage. Today, with some work to do, and a bit of free quiet time as everyone else had gone to a friend's party at a bloody theme park, I decided it was time to check out the spares boxes. While I found quite a few useful things, the Rolex wasn't one of them.

At this point it was clearly an act of foul play. As no one had been in my room apart from old friends and family I didn't think it had been swiped deliberately, but it really started to look as if someone had moved it. The beloved hadn't, the older kids and friends wouldn't and that just left the younger kids. So I sat back and thought thought where a child would dispose of a watch that wouldn't be immediately found. After a thorough poke under the fridge I started looking down the backs of radiators and on the third radiator I hit the jackpot.

In fact, not only did I hit the jackpot, but I also found out why the boiler seemed to have been working harder this winter, where all the magnetic letters had gone and some post I didn't realise we had had. The Rolex was a little too warm to the touch and must have been in a few magnetic fields, but it seems to be working just fine, which is fairly impressive for a watch that has been down the back of a radiator since sometime around Christmas.

So here it is. Again:



Small, battered and lovely.