He had made it many years ago, when he was a child learning his catechism. It was a simple thing - a cross made of lollipop sticks, with a pipecleaner man stretched upon it - but it had stayed with him for years. When he had left home and gone to university, he had placed the homemade crucifix on the wall in his student room. As he moved from one set of digs to another, he had taken the icon with him, placing it between the pages of his bible to keep it safe. The cross and its occupant had followed him into adulthood, and gone with him from room to flat and flat to his first house. In his mind, it was not a home unless it had the pipecleaner Christ.

"Sara!" he called out to his newly-wed wife.

The reply echoed up the stairwell, bouncing between the bare walls. "What is it?"

"My crucifix - have you seen it?"

"Didn't you put it into the box with all the books?"

He looked at the packing crate that the moving men had left in the middle of the bedroom. It was packed with books and tissue-wrapped ornaments.

"Thanks!"

He started pulling the books out of the crate, placing them on the floor around him in piles of three or four until he found his bible. The bible had somehow ended up caught part-opened on a mirror. Either the person packing the crate had been careless or, more likely, the crate's contents had shifted during the move. He lifted the bible out and riffled through its pages, hoping to find his crucifix. It wasn't there.

Where was it?

Once more, he dug into the crate, pulling everything out and strewing things across the floor in his panic. He finally found his cross. It had fallen into a corner of the crate, forced between the slats. The arms of the cross had broken into three pieces, and the pipecleaner Christ had been reduced to a tangle of stripped wires and broken bristles. He looked up at the spot on the wall where he would have hung the crucifix, and sighed in disappointment.

The next day he went to a nearby art shop. There, he bought a bag of lollipop sticks, a tub of glue, a ball of twine and a packet of pipecleaners. Then, in the kitchen of his new home, he began to make a new pipecleaner Christ.