THIS week is: British Tomato week, Dementia Action Week, Walk to School Week and Children’s Hospice Week. Tuesday was World Goth Day; Wednesday, World Turtle Day; tomorrow European Neighbours Day. Saturday marks the start of English Wine Week and National Go Canoeing week.

I’m not sure how I’ll get round to marking all those. I had a tomato for lunch and passed the dementia awareness tent in The Close while walking Barney the Beagle on Monday; I felt suitably guilty driving my son to school and thank God that I have not needed the outstanding services of Naomi House. I’m just pleased that it’s there and think it a disgrace that the whole hospice movement in this country is funded from money donated by the public.

As for turtles, I have banished drinking straws from the house and have cut down my use of plastic; I would spend more time in the company of our European neighbours if annual leave and my bank balance permitted; I drink the odd bottle of English wine when I can afford it and would like to go canoeing, but can’t see it happening this year…

All bases covered. Except for tomorrow; probably the most significant, if largely overlooked, day of the celebratory week – International Missing Children’s Day. Close to my heart; I have spent the greater part of my working life working for charities that devote themselves to preventing, rescuing and supporting runaway, abducted and missing children.

Some 80,000 children go missing each year in this country. That’s roughly twice the population of Salisbury. Most will be found and returned. But a disturbing number will end up on the streets or become victims of grooming and sexual exploitation.

A disproportionately high number of those are children ‘in care’ for whom the state has assumed responsibility, because their parents cannot, or because it is unsafe for them to live at home. Having been deprived of love for much of their lives, these children fall easy prey to gangs who will befriend, manipulate and exploit them, breaking into pieces lives already fragile through neglect.

Social care budgets are now stretched beyond breaking point; as a society it appears that we do not consider their lives worth investing in the care that would save or protect them. We leave it to charities to pick up the pieces of social disintegration.

And yet time and time again, reports and enquiries into runaway, exploited or abducted children come to the same conclusion; that prevention is easier than cure; that most runaways, disappearances or criminal exploitation could have been prevented if only someone had taken the time and trouble to listen to and believe the victims.

Perhaps the best way to mark Missing Children’s Day is to devote more of our time to really listening to the concerns of children whose lives we are privileged to be a part of.