We have had several days of beautiful sunshine now and it’s really feeling like spring. It’s a shame that I’ve seen virtually none of it, what with working all day Sunday then spending two days inside the house turning every drawer, shelf, cupboard, nook and cranny out onto the floor in a desperate and ultimately futile search for my exam results.

OK – I know I should have been more careful and not lost them, but to be frank, I thought that thirty+ years since I sat my O and A levels, that their relevance in my world had dwindled to nil. Also, I’ve moved house eight times since then and even after all of that I could have laid my hands on them in a moment when we lived in Sandhurst. I can picture them now, in their pale blue cardboard tube, with its white plastic stoppers, in my desk drawer.

Yesterday I unpicked every last bit of my office and today the rest of the house has met with the same fate. Each room being pulled apart with increasing urgency and panic.

I now have to admit that despite my best efforts, I cannot find said bits of paper and this puts my future in jeopardy. Yikes. There is a black hole in our house and they seem to have disappeared into it along with David’s Spurs away shirt and a couple of other bits and bobs.

So, I went online and looked up “lost exam results” in google uk. I discovered that it’s possible to get a certificate from the exam board that works as well as the originals but that it costs an arm and a leg to get it. The reason being that you need as separate one for each exam sitting and so by the time I’d added up the cost of five, plus the cost of photocopying my passport and my decree absolute then I calculated that my future career hangs in the balance for £200 or so.

On reflection, it’s a price worth paying but it’s also a month’s food for DM and I so it’s a very real and very large sum of money to me. This aside, I think my nervous system can’t stand the fretting so I just filled out the forms and sent them off with a cheque to get the blasted things.

The journey down to our local town to post my letter made me realise what I’d been missing – the weather was wonderful so when I got home, we got on out boots, clicked leads on the dogs and set off for an evening walk. It was cut short partly because our ancient steam engine (otherwise known as Archie) was clearly finding the walk difficult and partly because we discovered a path that we use all the time is no longer there. It’s fallen down a mineshaft! Blimey, another black hole. We do know that the moors that we wander on are riddled with old mine workings but this is a real reminder that we walk in dangerous places.