We all mislay things. My scissors for example, the pair with the orange handles. Can’t find them. They were there a couple of days ago – this evening – vanished! The bolts off the old bed which I put in a bag and placed somewhere safe so they wouldn’t get lost and, as it turned out, wouldn’t be found again either. But I don’t lose really, really important stuff. Unlike, apparently, NASA.

How, I ask myself, is it possible that NASA could lose the original recorded tapes of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing? Not, you understand, the stuff we saw on TV that night 37 years ago – that was beamed down to a monitor with a TV camera trained on it and re-broadcast (because of incompatible equipment). NO – these are the actual tapes that were recorded up there, on the moon. They’ve lost them. Sorry, mislaid them.

They were apparently delivered to the Goddard Space Centre in Maryland a year after the landing and haven’t been seen since and a year long search hasn’t yet turned them up. Here I was thinking that the 20th century saw the dawn of the kind of documentation that future historians will be drooling over – which they will be if they ever turn up!

No hold on – it doesn’t matter. The only machine capable of playing them is going to be decommissioned in October. Well – that’s a relief. Call off the search.