Ian McMillan: Setting the scene for mystery among the ruins

I WANT you to picture a scene; it's like an extract from a film, a doomy thriller set perhaps in an Eastern European country a few months after the tumble of the Berlin Wall.

Imagine it in black and white if you like, a kind of bleached late-January black and white, as though your snaps have come back from the chemist over-exposed and pale.

It looks like Eastern Europe but we're actually in England. Two middle-aged men, hatted and scarved in the cold, are wandering around the ruins of an old abbey. They're looking at the floor, ignoring the walls. At the other end of the ruins, by the place where the monks used to bake bread, a woman is looking at an information board.

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One of the middle-aged men curses, using ripe and fruity language that you don't often hear in an abbey except when the yeast doesn't rise, and the woman shakes her head slowly, the corners of her mouth turning down. She disapproves of these men. Let's face it: this is mysterious, and I'd better explain the mystery.

The two middle-aged blokes are me and my mate Tony Husband; we're on tour round the village halls of England doing our little comedy show and we've got a day off so we're visiting some historic sites. If we were younger and dafter, we'd be in a seedy badly-lit afternoon drinking den talking to men in broad-brimmed hats and women in suspenders, but we're sensible blokes so we're walking round some ruins. I don't know who the woman is; a tourist, I guess.

Tony has two claims to fame: he's one of Britain's leading cartoonists and he's one of Britain's leading losers of objects. Keys and phones and vital pieces of information on pieces of paper slip from his fingers or through holes in his pocket.

We once wandered from a pub late at night back to our B&B and a woman ran out and shouted: "Whose are these keys and this phone and this vital piece of information?" Tony raised his hand like a naughty schoolboy. He had no gloves on, of course, despite the cold. He'd lost them. We once had to drive back to a caf and knock on the locked door to rouse the grumpy owner because Tony had left his mobile phone on the table.

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And now he's lost his glasses. He's got two pairs, in case he loses one. One pair is stuck together with sellotape and one pair has a wobbly lens held in by gravity and hope. Tony's been taking photographs and he's got impatient with the sellotaped pair and got his wobbly pair from the car. He finds the wobbly pair better for seeing, he says, and he doesn't look quite as silly.

And now he's lost them. Somewhere between the car and the Abbey cloisters they've gone, and that's why we're walking around with our heads down, combing the ground with our eyes like coppers at a crime scene. We reasoned that if they'd fallen on the road we'd have heard them clatter so they must have fallen on the grass. And here's a fact: there's a vast acreage of grass in this particular ruined abbey.

As we wander like monks in a silent order, heads bowed, I reflect on the idea of losing things. Is something actually lost or merely in another place? When I find a quid on the floor and pocket it with a guilty thrill, am I completing some kind of circle of lost-and-foundness? Do all the objects in the world just float around in a kind of cloud, waiting for people to lose and find them? You get those kinds of profound thoughts when you're perambulating around a sacred site, I find. Especially when you're walking with your head down and then you look up too quickly and your brain spins.

My mind returns to The Mystery of the Lost Yorkshire Pudding Tins, a disappearance that would have confounded even Sherlock Holmes.

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When we moved house in 1973 from Barnsley Road to Edderthorpe Lane, my mother packed her favourite Yorkshire Pudding tins in a box and sealed the box with string, and they never got to the new house. The other things in the box turned up safe and sound but the Yorkshire Pudding tins remained in a kind of limbo, hovering somewhere between North Street and Doncaster Road. We never found out what happened to them and my mother often talked about them. Best Yorkshire Pudding tins she ever had, she said.

And now, in this mysterious black and white film in the fridge-cold of a winter's day, maybe they'll turn up here, in the ruins of this Abbey, near the place where the monks used to bake the bread. Maybe they liked Yorkshire Puddings, too. My mind is wandering. Suddenly Tony shouts from the far end of the site "Found them!" and he's holding his glasses up in triumph. They've fallen in a hedge by the side of the road, so we can go. Once he's located his car keys.

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