In theory, what with e-mail, friendsreunited, cheap flights and cheaper telephone calls, the world has become smaller, a more difficult place in which to get lost.

Or so it appeared, until a hospital in Kent appealed for help identifying a man who had been found near Sheerness beach in a dripping-wet suit without labels - a man who refused to talk, and whose defining feature was a talent for the piano.

Six weeks after his arrival at the Medway Maritime Hospital and five days after officials released a picture of him, the identity of Mr X - universally dubbed the 'Piano Man' - remains a mystery.

The National Missing Persons Helpline has received around 1,000 calls and e-mails from the UK and overseas, but there has been no sign yet that they are any closer to solving the puzzle of the Piano Man. The Kent and Medway NHS Trust said today that Mr X has now been given a piano in his room.

In an age when a Google search puts most of the information ever known to man within the click of a mouse, how can a team of the NHS's finest fail to put a name to a man whose picture and description have been published around the world? That, perhaps, is a mystery in itself.

Times Online readers have also joined in the effort to identify the Piano Man. We have had a steady stream of reader e-mails this week suggesting who the man might be, or what tack investigators should take to track him down.

Among them was a reader from Italy, who pointed out that a Polish mime artist had named an itinerant French busker. But the busker in question had, it turned out, been seen playing on the streets of Nice the previous day.

One reader said that he was confident that the man pictured was an autistic savant with musical talent from the Middlesex area, who went on to play as a concert pianist in Germany. But an Uxbridge piano teacher said that he knew the man in question, and it was definitely not him.

Another pointed out a news article about a Swedish student who went missing in Australia after apparently falling in with a strange cult. The student certainly bears a physical resemblance to the Piano Man, but is too young and too tall.

One Portuguese reader wrote in to say that the man was the spitting image of a shy Bulgarian whom he picked up hitchhiking last December, a man who annoyed the patrons at a bar he took him to by playing the piano while the television was showing a UEFA cup tie between Benfica and Estugarda.

"He pulled up his chair and began to play - Lizst, then Mozart.. then a rhapsody of tunes from Aznavour, Brel, Elton John, Armstrong and Gershwin, until the waiter brought along a jug of wine and a glass," he wrote.

And a lecturer in music from Oxford University thinks that he went to college with the Piano Man in Edinburgh in the late 1980s, after which the man in question moved to New York as a music teacher. He is still trying to track down his friend, so that possibility remains open.

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