If it's that lost, you'll only find it when your searching for the next thing that's really missing. It wouldn't have ended up in a suitcase when you were moving stuff around for packing for one of your trips?

No?

I didn't think so...

It happens to me so often that I sometimes think I never had them in the first place and that they were simply a figment of my increasingly deranged imagination...

Now, were did I hide that little known manuscript of the 3rd and 4th mts of Schubert's 8th Symphony? 

You clearly all speak from experience...

No, I don't share my flat with anything capable of locomotion apart from an acceptable number of unavoidable insects and microbes and they've all denied knowledge. I do still wonder if Aaron Cassidy the Graupner Hater might have activated a sleeper program he hid with the click track of a piece of his I did using this computer. That might have enabled him to annihilate the disc remotely. They can do these things now, you know. Yes they can. Dearie me yes. Can't be too careful.

Ron, every pocket of every suitcase has indeed been scoured.

I feel quite comfortable blaming Aaron for this.  He has a history, you know; back in Buffalo, he once made a poor fellow's entire Biber collection disappear in a puff of smoke, leaving nothing but Jürg Frey and Peter Ablinger in their place.  If you detect a sudden increase in the size of your Wandelweiser section, look no further.

Inside a duvet cover that has been put away? I only mention it because of a transcendentally joyous moment when a chewed, grey, shapeless but irreplaceably loved thing called 'horsey' turned up after several fraught weeks when my daughter was about three. [It was mine, but she was about three. Erf, erf.]

The only other suggestion is to buy another copy (or perhaps that isn't possible? hence the crisis?). That will immediately lure it out of its hiding place. Unfortunately it's no good just borrowing another one as bait. It will see through that little subterfuge immediately. They do, you know.

[Oh. Ron beat me to it with that one ]

Or... in another cd box. Now that could be a real pain as you obviously have thousands, but I have sometimes found a lost cd in another box...the one I had been listening to before the one lost...

Good luck ollie... keep us informed of progress!!

I think a solid mmmmmmmmmm may help..?

A

Well, of course things could be worse. Unlike Wittgenstein I could hop off to Amazon.de and get another one.

But it's the principle! (Even musicians have them you know.) Things aren't supposed to just vanish. It must be here somewhere!

Thanks for the suggestions A. Tried the suitcases and the fridge and the underwear drawer (!!), it can't be amid the computer CDs because it's in a case and they aren't, I don't actually have any plants or a car. I thought I had even tried the places I don't go often (or ever - there's only 45 sq m of floor here). Even under the sofabed. Gosh that was a revelation. But not of the whereabouts of Christmas in Darmstadt.

Maybe I might try George and Ron's suggestion of ordering another one. Then when it arrives the old one will surely turn up immediately. Then I'll send the new one to whoever has given either the most accurate or most amusing suggestion for the old one's hiding place.

Anyone up for a little R3OK competition then?