I AM wondering, as I sit here writing this, if my efforts this week will turn out to be completely in vain.

If each word I write may turn out to be for absolutely nothing, obsolete following a rapid series of events, effectively a huge waste of time.

But when I tell you my thoughts at this very moment are of eight-year-old schoolgirl Sarah Payne, still missing up to press, I'm sure you'll understand.

You see I'm thinking, hoping even, that by the time you read this she may have been found. Safe and well. Smiling, teary-eyed maybe, traumatised even, but glad to be back and looking forward to an emotional reunion with mum and dad.

If she has, I for one will be glad to have wasted a couple of hours of my time in a fortnight that must have seemed like two whole centuries in the lives of her exhausted parents or brothers or the little girl too young to understand what has happened to big sis.

If she is still missing, I'm sure she will continue to occupy your thoughts as she has mine for her disappearance is certainly a strange and terrifying thing.

To think a young girl on her way home can brush through a hedge but, effectively, not appear on the other side is like something out of a children's fantasy -- like the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or one of Harry Potter's record-breaking wizardry tales.

It's like some kind of dark magic trick, like piff, paff, puff! She's gone. An eight-year-old child vanished into thin air. Only two weeks after Sarah's brother lost sight of her as she stepped from a cornfield into a quiet country lane, the traditional happy endings of Aesop's Fables or Hans Christian Andersen seem a long way away.

Sarah's parents, looking wearier and more shattered with each appeal on the television or radio or in the press, have not seen their daughter since.

How can that be? How can someone disappear off the face of the earth in one small step? And how can any parent sleep easy with the knowledge this child looks to have been snatched yards from her loving family? Twenty years ago my mum and dad used to warn my brother and I about talking to strangers or accepting lifts home from school but I'm sure they never for one moment thought anything like that would really happen to us.

It was a precautionary step, a quiet reminder that not everyone is great and good.

More often than not they would joke about how anyone who decided to run away with me would think better of it after an hour's non-stop chatter and bring me back.

I am sure Sarah's mum and dad did the same.

Even now, even after such horrifying cases as the abduction of Liverpool toddler Jamie Bulger have left the nation permanently shocked and scarred, no one really thinks such atrocities will happen to them or theirs.

Children continue to wander about on their own and women still walk home alone.

Thing is, something has happened, again, though what, as yet, we don't know.

Or maybe, by now, we do.

And, then again, maybe we don't want to, eh?