WHAT a summer it's been for disappearance and discovery. A doctor from Manchester who went missing in July has sadly still not surfaced. Young sweethearts Natasha Phillips, 12, and Ashley Lamprey, 15, did a short, romantic flit in the name of young love, before being discovered in a record store.

A 14-year-old schoolgirl disappeared in the company of a 46-year-old man, who is now facing prosecution.

And then a former Scotland Yard detective publishes a book in which he claims to have solved the most famous missing person case of them all. Duncan MacLaughlin maintains that he has discovered what happened to Lord Lucan, who disappeared in 1974, the day after his children's nanny was bludgeoned to death.

A Sunday newspaper splashed the news over two pages, with pictures as proof. One photograph was the famous snap of Lord Lucan, frozen in time with that cold-eyed stare and slicked-back hair glinting like liquid coal. The other showed an astonishingly hairy man with a beard down to his navel. Spot the difference indeed.

MacLaughlin presented his theory with a flourish: the dapper, well groomed old Etonian Lord Lucan ended his years in Goa disguised as a smelly old hippie. And there this story might at last have ended; except that stories about Lord Lucan never do end, they perpetually swing back into view like a grotesque old roundabout flaunting its skeletal showpiece.

Two days after the 'Lucan found' story, the errant nobleman was more correctly identified as Barry Halpin, a banjo-playing socialist drop-out who liked a drink.

The identification was made by the folk singer and entertainer Mike Harding, who wrote to a national newspaper with his news. A much-amused Harding said of his friend, who died in 1996, "How he will be laughing now, wherever he is, to think that he has been mistaken for that murderous hooray Henry."

I couldn't care less about what happened to Lord Lucan, as the long-lost disappearance of an aloof member of the upper classes is not a subject to elicit much in the way of sympathy. But mixing him up with a drunken old left-wing hippie, now that is a worthwhile story.

Lucan does at least fit one of our national obsessions: we do like a good old mystery or whodunit. Yet there is further power to this story, and all those others of people who vanish. It is that at times, on a bad day or in a moment of pique, we must all have been tempted to do the thin air trick.

Most of us don't melt away because the bonds tying us down are too treasured and too strong. Yet some do, going off for so long that they are presumed dead, when in fact they are lying low and living as someone else.

In the 1970s, life seemingly tripped over art when the Labour minister John Stonehouse faked his own death after placing his clothes on a Miami beach. This evaporation had more than a suggestion of the David Nobbs comedy series The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin, in which the put-upon Perrin staged his own drowning and later returned as an anarchic version of his old self.

To disappear is, in a sense I guess, a sort of dying, an abandonment of self, a chance to become someone new. But in the end it's probably better to try for a little bit of mystery instead of becoming one big selfish mystery.

Now I'm off to write a book claiming that Lord Lucan is really living out his life as Billy Connolly. Well, it seems just about as likely.

Updated: 10:42 Thursday, September 11, 2003