It’s a bit unfair to post when you can’t see the room but it is pretty sparse and there is the bed which has a duvet and sheet and then the table with the laptop on it. The bed has no crannies – it’s basically a glorified mattress so it was easy to strip it down.

That’s the thing – there was nowhere for the varmint to go. Now I have, before, looked for things and found them in my hand [Andrew's marbles allusion] and the bottom line this time is that I was prepared for this and all my foibles.

I then sat at a distance from the ground zero on the floor and stared at it, the floorspace and went through every permutation and combination I could think of. One of those was that I had inadvertently taken it to the kitchen.

I passed my hand over a one metre square where it might have fallen, in case it was a trick of the light. Not a sausage. I lifted up the bed on its side and then up from there onto its corner point – intrigued by now. Then I went to the kitchen.

When I came back in, there was no bedding on the bed – that had been put on a chair in the corner of the room. So there was a table and a bed and I lay on the bed and did some designing with the second pencil. I looked over at the floor where my hand had passed over before and there it was, just lying there.

I tell you it was mighty puzzling.

on the subject of the show, it is 50 years since it was first broadcast. One of the truly great tv shows