They'll turn up in the end. If they haven't slid down behind the photocopier in the chaotic mail room of Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs, Tyne and Wear, a bloke in IT is too immersed in Runescape to realise that he's using them as coasters; or the National Audit Office has lost the red card shoved through an unknocked door at 8am and they're hiding in the TNT depot with the birthday pyjamas I never received from my friend in Australia. I don't wish to trivialise the misplacement of 25 million pieces of personal banking data, but lost objects take their own good time.

Lost objects are there to confound us, to test our forbearance about the randomness of life. Like the favourite dress I thought I'd left in New York that turned up two years later crammed in my laptop case or my dad's car keys eventually located in my mother's peg bag, they will return.

The missing discs saga is one of those scales-from-eyes moments when you haemorrhage all awe for authority. It was the same when we learnt that the case for the invasion of Iraq was partly cut and pasted from the internet; you think surely not, that's how teenagers fiddle their geography GCSE modules, it wouldn't happen in Cabinet offices.

And the notion that a 23-year-old bloke, having whipped up a zip file detailing every child in the nation, puts down his Ginsters scotch egg slice for a moment, calls the courier company, but can't be arsed to fill in the additional labels to send the parcel as registered mail, is as comic as it is tragic. Certainly the jolly Indian lady in my local post office thought so on Wednesday: “Ha ha ha, dear, yes better post special delivery: else you'll have to send the police looking for it!”

I can quite understand why Gordon Brown so spectacularly lost his rag apologising for an act of such childish carelessness. I'd be the same if required to abase myself for every jumper, pen, protractor, shin-pad or homework sheet misplaced by my sons, one of whom uses the lost property box as a convenient wardrobe.

Because I never lose things. I know this declaration will inflame St Anthony to visit some spectacular act of absent-mindedness upon me, but I've had the same bunch of keys for a decade, my watch for 15 years. I've dropped a mobile phone down the toilet, but that doesn't count. So I've been punished for my rare ability to hold on to sunglasses for seven summers, by living with losers. In fact I'd say that if I was a character in Heroes, my super-power would be finding lost objects. Or maybe, living in an all-male household, it just feels that way.

Certainly while a small boy uproots the hall shoe basket in an angry flurry, I know to step outside where muddy football boots have remained, uncleaned, since last week's match. At the daily cry of “where's my keys/wallet/phone” I first stand very quiet and still. Mostly the stomping and frustrated cries will cease without me trailing upstairs, as is demanded, because the object is under his nose. If they persist in their stomping and crying I will calmly extract it from its obvious hiding place.

People who lose things blame other people who move things. But half my life is spent returning objects to their correct position, reversing what Professor Solomon, in his seminal work How to Find Lost Objects, calls “domestic drift”, ie, when secateurs are not returned to the shed but left rusting by the rose bush. It was a macro version of domestic drift that occurred at HMRC, a slippage of system: political drift.

How exasperated we become by those people who lose things. Feckless, careless, incompetent, wheedling, flapping their arms indignantly, saying that they're sorry but it's not their fault. Which often it isn't, but that doesn't matter, we won't trust them again with anything we value. In two years perhaps it will be: for the want of a disc, an election was lost, all for the want of care for a zip-drive disc...

My first question watching this year's quite glorious I'm a Celebrity...” is whether Janice Dickinson is a suitable ambassador for the international Janice community. Famous Janices, whether fictional or fact, are either plain or plain mad. While JD ticks the latter box, she must also be saluted by all holders of that dreary name as the first Diva Janice.

My second thought is how the wildlife that stalks the contestants in the Queensland rainforest is less pesky than the varmints plaguing me in inner-London Camberwell. Last weekend, performing the small yet pleasing chore of emptying the crumb drawer in the toaster, I noticed half a pitta bread jammed inside the electrics. I took it over to the sink to bash it firmly, but, nope, it was stuck. Only when I peered inside did I realise the pitta bread had tiny claws. We unscrewed the back to discover a rigid spatchcocked mouse. Ugh! It must have climbed into the extra-wide muffin slot and fried. Months ago.

Later, between mouthfuls of toast, my husband reflected how this proved that modern hygiene standards were excessive: eating dead-mouse-infused bread had done us no harm.

Next morning I came downstairs to find the cooked leg of lamb I'd left to cool on the side had disappeared; in the meantime on the lawn, dozing in the sunshine, looking suspiciously contented and replete, was a fox. He'd come into the house through our currently flapless catflap.

Should one take on the city's critters? I'm always overjoyed to find wildlife in the urban jungle. Which is why I tolerate the squirrels pillaging my figs and bulbs, even after I hung a peanut wreath for the bluetits (£5 from a very poncey shop) and ten minutes later it was dragged away by tufty felons. Having squirrels is like watching Ant and Dec frolic in your beech hedge.

But a neighbour has declared open season and bought a trap. Apparently it is illegal under the Wildlife and Country Act 1981 to release creatures caught on your property into the local park but it's not illegal to submerge a caged squirrel in the water butt, so it dies like Eva Green at the end of Casino Royale. The squirrel was bunged in the freezer until they caught a second, enough for a meagre but nutritious squirrel stew that tastes, I'm told, like chicken — but then that's what is said of all odd meats from emu to alligator. Anyway my friend's four children loved it, though I don't think Diva Janice could choke it down.

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