Life’s tiny dramas prove that there really are boy jobs and girl jobs

Among the more pungent literary forms of 19th-century France were the faits divers, or brief news items, known to the journalists who produced them as chiens écrasés, or squashed dogs. Flaubert is supposed to have found inspiration for his novel Madame Bovary in a fait divers, while the art critic and anarchist Félix Fénéon wrote over a thousand of these tiny dramas for the newspaper Le Matin, published after his death as Nouvelles en trois lignes.

In British papers, they are known as “news in brief ”, or “Nibs” for short, and they often have a haunting, Bovaryesque resonance: the echoes of what is left unsaid can be quite deafening.

One from The Daily Telegraph recently caught my eye. Headlined “Wife finds lost ring on beach two months later”, it told the story of Mr and Mrs Higson and Mr H’s wedding ring, which he had worn for 25 years before it vanished on the sands of Wright beach on Orkney, only to be found by Mrs H two months later – during which time Mr H had not mentioned losing his ring.

Isn’t there is an entire novel’s worth of narrative in those few words? What were they doing in Orkney? How and where was the ring lost? Why did Mr Higson not immediately confess to losing it (and why did Mrs Higson, clearly an observant woman, not notice its absence?) How did she know where to look for it, and why did the tide not sweep it away? Then, too, there are the wider questions – the interesting dynamics of who loses stuff, and who finds it.

“So many things seem filled with the intent/to be lost that their loss is no disaster…” Elizabeth Bishop observed in her poem “One Art”. Often such things come in pairs: gloves, earrings, even shoes. One of the most eloquent objects I have ever seen was a lone bronze high-heeled party shoe, size 36, washed up one morning on the Greenwich foreshore. I still wonder how it came to be lost, and how (or whether) its Cinderellafooted owner managed to hobble home without it.

As an inveterate loser of objects of which I am fond, I was consoled by Kate Moss’s announcement in last Saturday’s Telegraph Magazine that “nobody wears pairs of earrings any more; it’s old-fashioned”.

A new life, then, for the single 19th-century garnet drop earring, and the cheap-as-chips Accessorize teardrop of greenish stone whose lost pairs lie somewhere between the Thames and the London Library? Perhaps, though I suspect that the Platonic pursuit of wholeness means that I will always mourn their single state.

For someone who loses stuff so frequently, I am briskly unsympathetic when it comes to finding other people’s lost treasures. “It’s wherever you left it,” I find myself saying, rounding up the mislaid West Ham season ticket/gloves/ passport from wherever their owners have dropped them. I think of it as what Theresa May might call a girl job. Both sexes lose stuff, but somehow recovering it tends to be a female talent.

Or so I thought until, “Is this yours?” my partner said the other night, holding up a small glittery object: a wing-shaped ring of white metal and paste, its design as exquisite as its value was negligible.

I lost it a year ago, and have been mourning it ever since. And there it was, discovered – in an elegant bit of role reversal – in the vegetable rack while he was foraging for onions while making supper.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master. The art of finding, on the other hand, is a rare and special gift.