IT WAS quite an ordinary buff, A5 sized envelope, passed from one person to another in a village hall and put down on a nearby pile of trestles while the recipient shrugged herself into her coat. Coat on, she turned to pick it up and there it wasn't. It hasn't been seen since.

The other three of us searched through our own notebooks and bits of paper, just in case we'd picked it up by accident, though we'd been several feet from the two concerned. We searched under the trestles. We looked in silly places. In a few seconds, it couldn't have got far.

Ah, but "far" is irrelevant where the fourth dimension is concerned and that, I presume, is where it now rests. It needn't feel too smug and triumphant; its contents weren't vital or irreplaceable.

In that fourth dimension, it's probably keeping company with at least half a dozen of Sir's socks.

Men's socks are a prize example of unacountable disappearances. They don't go on the loose and get left in the linen basket. If I drop one on the way downstairs, it stays where it fell and I find it again (always after the others are swirling round in the washer, of course). I peg an even number out on the line.

When, dry and aired, I come to sort them into pairs, the last two never match. They're not just identical black ones, differently shaded by their respective ages; I got wise to that game years ago and it rather does for the theory of always buying identical socks. At the end, there will be one black and one navy sock, or one plain grey and one ribbed.

If I were married to an eccentric who didn't care if he wore odd socks, I could explain it. If the washer ground to a halt with odd socks stuck in the works, I could explain it. If either of the two odd socks matched any of those in the drawer, living in hope from previous weeks, I could explain it, sort of.

As it is, I'm indebted to a report of a lecture by Prof Stephen Hawking, who claimed that they disappeared down mini black holes which were created by quantum gravitational effects.

Now I don't understand that any more than I understood his Brief History of Time, but it does sound like an impressively scientific explanation of that fourth dimension.

Handkerchieves go down those black holes, too, so do ballpoint pens and kitchen teaspoons. Maybe there's a sort of outer-space version of The Borrowers who are setting up sock and hankie shops and office supply outlets with what we lose.

Not all things which vanish have been lost, however. Some just go quietly out of existence while we aren't looking. Like proper teapots - pottery ones with small holes at the base of the spout; ones for using with leaf tea. Since I bounced our everyday teapot, I've looked in vain for a new one. I even went mad and into Binns to look at Sunday best ones. All teabag-only versions. I mix two leaf teas to get the blend we like; one cupful from these teabag pots fills the strainer with leaves. The search goes on