Country Living with Francis Farragher

THERE I was during an errant moment last week gently nibbling away at a thumbnail that had grown too big for its skin, when I happened to bump into a website that listed out thousands of bad habits that we all fall into at different levels.

While nail biting might be one of the more harmless ones, even it is still an annoyance for any third party onlooker, there was just a little bit of self-guilt when I read about the over-use of profanities and even more worryingly when you start cursing at yourself.

Such outbursts should be strictly undertaken when there is no one else in the house of office but there is a kind of grim satisfaction at giving yourself a b——ing when you cannot find keys, mobile phone or wallet . . . just when you need them most.

I even got a present a ‘magic finder’ gadget for Christmas, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out where I left it and I seriously bemoaned its loss one evening last week when a wallet disappeared ‘clean into mid-air’ somewhere between going to bed at a sensible hour and rising early the following morning.

“Where in the f— did I put it? How could I manage to lose a wallet in my own bedroom? Maybe even worse? Could the dreaded dementia be setting in early? (well, relatively early!).

The chances of a burglar secretly entering my room in the dead of night via locked doors and closed windows seemed a bit outlandish to believe, even at my paranoid best, so that there was nothing for it but to take ‘me batin’ and hope that the issue could resolve itself.

All was revealed the following evening when I went to don one of my speck caps and lo and behold underneath it, all nice and comfortable, was the brown leather wallet. The wallet had been left on a shelf and a flick of the cap at bedtime onto the shelf ended up providing the most devious of hiding place for a piece of leather that’s home to about 20 different cards.