For a woman, my handbag is pretty small and pretty empty. Apart from the infrequently used things I stuff in the side pockets, it carries my wallet, phone, keys, lipstick in a case, mints, a USB stick and a couple of pens. Not much really.

But somehow, even in a small big, with so few things in it, in the last few months I have lost a couple of things in my handbag. The first was a USB stick - I swore I had put it in there and when it came time to get it, couldn’t find it for the life of me. Then it was my lipstick case. Again, pulling the bag apart and removing all its content did not result in it turning up. Finally, a couple of weeks ago it was my sunglasses. The search was without success. I knew the last place I had seen this items was in my handbag.

And then, anywhere between a week and a month after their disappearance, all the items I had been missing, amazingly turned up again, in the same handbag that I had turned inside out trying to find them in. I only have one handbag, so I hadn’t mixed up which bag it was in and they were not things that other people borrowed and sneakily returned without my knowledge.

So there is a blackhole in my handbag. Where it leads to and how it decides which items to take, I can’t say. I also can’t tell you why those items come back and how it chooses the timeline of their return. But I can say anecdotally, that I am sure that there are many more women’s handbags out there that also have blackholes in them. I am not the only one to suffer from these mysterious disappearances. Whether we will ever solve them, only time will tell.

Interestingly, as I was pondering this mystery, so were Garfield and Jon - check out their thoughts at [Garfield - The vault](http://www.garfield.com/comics/vault.html), running from October 12th to 17th.

Michelle