I AM at a loss over the camera. It was there when the photograph was taken, that’s for sure, but nowhere to be seen a few days later.

In between taking the picture and wanting to extract it, the camera went missing. Perhaps it is hiding somewhere in our house, but if so it is very good at hide and seek.

All the likely hiding places have been searched, alongside plenty of unlikely ones too. And the camera has gone, which is a great loss as we like that camera. It’s small, handy and inexpensive, but it does for us. Or it did.

How things go missing is one of those mysteries. Objects left on trains or buses might, with luck, end up with lost property.

But what about anything lost around the house? Perhaps there is a domestic lost property department when all the missing things congregate and have a giggle.

My favourite theory, that a sneak thief broke into the house without doing any damage at all and then stole only one relatively cheap camera, is not looking good; certainly not as sound as another theory: which is that some idiot lost it.

Perhaps a sneaky house sprite spirited the camera away and buried it in the hidden dusty recesses. Yes, that’s definitely a possibility; although it’s more likely that some idiot lost it.

Not being able to find something is one of life’s great frustrations. You know something is there and then it isn’t.

The box the camera came in is still sitting on a shelf in the study; the case is still where the picture was taken; but the camera has gone. I have lost a few things over the years: a pair of cowboy boots stolen during my student days; an old-fashioned scarf silk-style left at York Theatre Royal; rather a lot of hair; and, somewhere along the way, my brilliant future.

That last one is a joke, more or less. Many of us find that what we had outlined with dim hopefulness when young fails to materialise. How you cope is one of those challenges. My best advice is to find pride and enjoyment in what you do and to keep one eye on the bright side.

There are a few old sayings about loss. Some cover discouragement (“to lose heart”), while others convey simply enough the notion of defeat (“to lose the day”); and some are perhaps only to be found in very old copies of Brewer’s Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable (“to lose caste”: to lose position in society).

Other such sayings are sturdily old-fashioned, such as “lose the horse to win the saddle”, which suggests winning everything or nothing; or an old naval one: “losing a ship for a ha’p’orth o’ tar”, which indicates suffering a great loss out of stinginess.

But nowhere yet have I been able to find a saying about a camera that disappears into thin air shortly after being used to take a photograph.

• OF ALL the York events, York Open Studios is one of my favourites. We have been every year and enjoy the trek from house to house, studio to studio.

This year we walked seven miles or more, into town, around some of the studios and back again. Mark Hearld’s house on The Mount is a great highlight and a step up from the fascinating claustrophobia of his old flat in Portland Street, a sort of delightful artistic junk shop, where his paintings fought for space with whatever else had caught his eye.

Nearly all of Mark’s paintings had been sold by last weekend, along with most of Emily Sutton’s at the same address.

Pieces have been bought over the years, by Tim Morrison, Gerard Hobson and Adrienne French, but others have been missed. I loved the work of Freya Horsley years ago, but lacked the funds or the courage, and now they are beyond my reach.

But Tim’s linoprint of York hangs in the hall, Gerard’s hand-coloured linoprint watches over us while we watch television, and Adrienne’s linocut is on the stairs, just up from a black and white photograph by Simon Palmour.

If my lottery numbers ever come up, various York artists should do well out of it.