Blaise Tapp: Call out the search teams my mobile has gone missing

By Blaise Tapp
Published 25th May 2023, 05:24 BST
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Despite a lifetime of searching, I have reached the conclusion that I don’t have a special useful talent.

As a precocious youngster, I saw myself as an actor but, despite not being terrible, I soon realised that, with a serious lack of good looks, coupled with an average stage presence, the best I could hope for would be an appearance in a telly advert for oven chips. I could sing a bit too but then puberty intervened, meaning I have sounded like one of The Muppets ever since.

Although there are things that I am quite good at I’m pretty certain that my name won’t appear in any hall of fame, anywhere. For anything. Unless, there is a society that I have yet to discover, which celebrates the art of losing stuff. I am a leading expert at misplacing most of my possessions and the one item I lose more than any other is my mobile phone with the most recent incident occurring on a local municipal playing field.

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It was an unusually pleasant evening, prompting me to pull on a pair of shorts for the first time since we went away at Easter. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that these weren’t the shorts to wear if I wanted to carry valuables on my person, on account of their very shallow pockets.

Panic set in when Blaise realised he had lost his phone in the long grassPanic set in when Blaise realised he had lost his phone in the long grass
Panic set in when Blaise realised he had lost his phone in the long grass

Needless to say my phone dropped out of my pocket in a large area of grass that hadn’t been mowed by the local council this year. It didn’t help that my bomb proof phone case is green - it was a couple of quid cheaper than the black or red ones - making it even harder to spot in the foot high undergrowth.

It wasn’t long before members of the local Beaver colony - that’s mini scouts not the furry North American dam enthusiasts - joined me in my feeble attempts to retrace my footsteps.

In the 30 minutes without my smartphone, I experienced a wide range of emotions - including, I’m ashamed to say, anxiety, which prompted me to exclaim ‘I can’t lose my phone, my whole life is in there’.

It eventually turned up and it wasn’t Mrs Tapp who saved the day this time - despite the fact she turned up with our youngest’s metal detector - but a sharp-eyed Beaver leader.