As a Yorkshire lass living in the capital I make my fair share of journeys south-north, and back again. This Christmas however, passage back to London proved…problematic. I’ll spare you an in-depth reconstruction, but let’s just say it involved my train being cancelled, a diversion through Sheffield and enduring three hours of non-stop football chants from other passengers in my carriage.

I would have moved to let this jovial bunch have their fun, but I was loaded down with more bags than usual so mobility was a bit of a sticking point. After a four and half hour journey (that should have taken two hours) I did something I never do: I hailed a taxi so I could get home quickly and with minimum struggle. I’d worked hard this year, I told myself. I could allow myself this one little luxury.

I have little call for taxi rides. But, should the need arise, I do have a rule of only ever getting into licensed black cabs. As a woman often travelling alone it’s the only way I feel safe. It is a choice that played a significant part in the outcome of this story as black cabs are part of a larger network and community – which in my book is always an asset.

The driver was lovely and zipped me back to our road, though crucially not my precise door number, in north London in record time. I paid my fare and lugged the bags out of the cab… or so I thought. When I got to my doorstep I realized that in my tiredness I had forgotten the rucksack containing my laptop. The laptop in question contained the most up-to-date version of my latest novel. It also housed several new poems I’d been working on and countless family photographs that I’m sure you can all guess I wasn’t bright enough to make copies of.

Dropping the other bags, I raced (oh alright, my own less-than-athletic version of ‘raced’) back to the spot where the cab had dropped me just in time to see the car turn off at the end of our road and disappear into the night.

Straggling back to the bags I’d abandoned and lugging them up the stairs to our first floor flat, I realized I was physically shaking. I had never lost anything so valuable in my whole 37 years on the planet and had no idea how to start recovering my property.

The internet was my first go-to. Surely Google would have a number I could call or specific advice on what to do in this situation? The closest thing I could find was a lost property claims form on the Transport for London (TfL) website which I hastily filled in before calling my husband in tears.

Once I’d hung up the phone, I lit a candle and tried to calm down after the shock. I reminded myself that the laptop was just a material object and that a person could lose much worse things than that. I took a deep breath and said to anyone who might be listening, that I would accept the consequences of my mistake. If that meant accepting the loss of the words and photos, then that’s what I would do. I promised that whatever the outcome, I would trust it had happened for the best. Maybe I would write new, better words? Maybe some of those photos were awful and better off lost (admittedly not all of them are award-winning portraits of family life).

I went back down into the street a couple of times on the off-chance the driver had found the bag and returned. As it happens, he did try but it must have been seconds after I decided that I couldn’t sit in the street all night because we missed each other.

The next day I sent out a tweet tagging several cab-related companies and TfL appealing for help. This tweet was shared more than 200 times in 24 hours and one of the companies I tagged – Cabvision -checked their transactions for the night before to see if I’d paid through their system (luckily I had paid by card so the payment was traceable). When nothing showed on their systems, Cabvision recommended that I get in touch with my bank to find out which company had processed the fare.

Another stroke of luck: there was one working day left before Christmas so I could go to my bank in person. They gave me the name of the company: CMT, I contacted them and they contacted the cab driver who, it transpired, had handed it into a police station. Tidal waves of relief and gratitude washed over me on hearing this news. CMT gave me a reference number. All I had to do was get in touch with the police station to check if they still had it or if they had handed it over to TfL…

Over the course of the next eight hours I called the non-emergency police number several times so they could patch me through but nobody was picking up at the station. A consequence of government cuts? I don’t know. But I do know the police have a great many better things to be doing than solving first world problems like this one.

Over those eight hours I received conflicting advice. One operator told me they didn’t think anyone would have time to hand it over to TfL over Christmas. Another told me the police never pass on lost property recovered from taxis to TfL. Although the information was confused, I must underline that the operators were very obviously saying and doing what they thought was best to help me, and their kindness was appreciated.

With no way of getting in touch with the station by phone however, it became clear I was going to have to wait until Christmas was over to recover my lost property. By this point I was staying with my in-laws on the other side of London and disrupting their Christmas plans with a visit to a police station didn’t seem fair when I knew it had been handed in and was thus safe.

It took two separate trips to the station to find out what had happened to my property. It had, as I suspected, been passed to the TfL lost property office where I was tearfully reunited with my laptop for a mere £32.00. A small portion of this fee will go to the cab driver who kindly handed in my bag. I am beyond grateful to all those in the cab driving community who shared my tweet in an attempt to help out a stranger they didn’t know. To those who lit their own candles for me, who said prayers to St Anthony and to both Cabvision and CMT. The former gave me great advice on how to retrieve my lost property and the latter tracked down the driver. All of the well-wishes and guidance were very gratefully received at this somewhat testing time.

But most of all, I’m grateful to the cab driver who went out of his way two days before Christmas to hand in a bag from a relatively small fare. With the dizzyingly brutal headlines we endure on a daily basis, it is gestures of good will such as this that keep our hearts warm and beating.