VANISHING ACT There was a gadget in the old Star Trek TV show that de-materialized people and then re-materialized them thousands or millions of miles away. This sounds like a fun way to travel; no waiting in queues for visas, no expensive airline bookings, no rotten flights for the air sick or those afraid of flying... But it wasn’t really much fun when it first happened. That was when the “gift” first manifested itself. “Gift” did I say? Curse, more like. I didn’t notice at first, going to University College Cork and adjusting to hostel life for the first time has a way of distracting you. Attention-grabbing peers, the academic course load, etc. etc. also didn’t help. Anyway, I had a history of losing stuff since I was a wee colleen with flame-red hair in pigtails. So I chalked up the mysterious vanishing of sundry study materials and some of my personal kit to a natural propensity of mislaying my possessions and didn’t give it much further thought. Big m...