You dream of a novel long before you write it. It ferments in some depthless place in your subconscious and, when it’s ready to pop out, it will tap on your skull like a spoon against a hardboiled egg. Once the tapping starts, the best thing you can do is just clear your desk and your diary and get to work.

This magical thing was happening to me – a novel was knocking around in my skull. I had a rough go at it last year. It didn’t work. I threw it out on 1 January and started again. I spent most of April writing, getting half of it down – about 35,000 words.

It was good stuff. Not all of it. But some of it. And that was enough.

So it was with a light heart and a heavy bag that I stepped off the plane at Melbourne airport on Friday night. I’d been in the Kimberley all week on assignment.

I exited the plane, arms full, and put my four or so bags and coat down to adjust my bra strap or backpack – some small, fatal move – then picked my bags up and went to the loo.

Washing my hands I realised something was missing. My bag was lighter.

Oh fuck. My laptop.

“Is my laptop in there?” I asked the occupant in the stall.

“No.”

Panic rising I ran out to the lounge. I must have left it on the chair when I put my stuff down. The last dregs of the Perth flights – tired businesspeople, mostly – were streaming into the chill Melbourne night.

I ran back to the gate lounge, maybe it was still on the plane. Talking to the staff was another distraught passenger who was saying he’d left his book on the plane. The wait for them to return from looking took forever.

“I’ve lost my book too,” I told the man.

My laptop wasn’t on the plane, it wasn’t on the seats, it wasn’t under the seats. The terminal was a pinball machine and I was a ball bearing, shooting this way and that, almost too frantic to see.

A cleaner helped me but even he shrugged his shoulders as it got towards midnight and said: “It’s gone.”

Gone? Where? Stolen? Closing time. The terminal was empty but I didn’t want to leave without my computer.

The panic turned into despair. This. Again. Self-loathing kicked in. Why couldn’t I take care of my things? Why did I keep losing things? This was the second laptop in a year. I couldn’t afford to keep replacing it.

In my pockets and bags were envelopes of cash, because the week before I had lost my ATM card – again.

I sent a sad tweet out saying: “I have lost my laptop, please pray for me.”

I got a reply back immediately. It was Russell Crowe asking where I might have left it. Did it have any identifying features? Crowe and I follow each other on Twitter but have never met in real life. He has come to my aid before; giving me advice about handling the terrifying python at my place in Brisbane, reassuring me that I would find true love (He tweeted “One day your prince will come Brigid” in response to a tweet about the royal wedding), and tweeting out nice things about my stories.

While my general level of chaos has made life harder for me, the compensation has been formidable: the Gladiator is my guardian angel.

While I was crying in the cab, going into the city, someone in my group chat told me to check out Twitter: “Rusty’s offered a reward for the return of your laptop!”

“Anybody in Melbourne happen to have seen this computer?” it read.

“There shall be a reward ( provided by me ) for its return.

“No questions asked.”

Meanwhile, I was beating myself up. I felt almost physical pain when I thought about what I had lost. It’s hard to replicate work done on a novel. It comes from a different place than journalism or nonfiction. Sometimes writing a character when you’re in flow feels like a spiritual act. It’s less writing and more a visitation. Could this be summoned again?

The next morning I had coffee with my friend Erik, who suggested that losing my laptop was a blessing, that first drafts of novels are often pretty terrible. That by losing it I would be forced to start again and would do it a lot cleaner this time because I had lost all the bits where I was “working it out”.

Do you know anyone who has done that? I asked Erik.

He admitted no one had. Of course they hadn’t.

Russell Crowe asked me to send him a recent photo of the laptop case. I found one from January when I had accidentally left it on the ground of a Clovelly apartment block and it had been returned to me. Russell tweeted the picture and Instagrammed it, once again with a promise of a reward, NO QUESTIONS ASKED.

That evening I bought a $300 computer from Officeworks that crashed when I had more than one tab open.

The @ key wouldn’t work, nor would the quote marks. It took hours to type up the piece that was due and I had to cut and paste “” marks from the internet that were all the wrong way round.

Meanwhile my friend Dan, who is a software engineer and I’m sure has better things to do with his Saturday night than talk me through downloading software, was trying to see if we could get my novel off the cloud. Dan is a genius. But the files, which looked promising at first, were empty or corrupted.

On Twitter, the messages of support flooded in. Many say Twitter is the worst place in the world, but it was the best. (I may be the only person in the world who goes to Twitter to feel better about humanity.)

People were offering to contribute to the reward, people were telling me terrible stories of when they lost their PhDs or novels or all their baby photos. I tried to reply to everyone but my new terrible computer kept crashing.

On Tuesday, work loaned me a Mac and I was able to access the cloud, where the bulk of my novel was still stored. Hallelujah. After sleepless nights and days of distress I didn’t have my laptop but I had my novel. I thought that was enough of a happy ending.

***

Then something truly odd happened. I was about to file this column when Guardian Australia’s receptionist called. My laptop might have been found: call this number and speak to Billie.

It was a Bendigo number, about 20 minutes from where I live.

Billie answered and asked me to describe the laptop case. I did and she said: “We have it!”

“But, but, how do you get it? And how did you find me?”

Billie’s boss was on the Perth flight and went to the car park to drive home to central Victoria. My laptop was on the ground in the car park and it had a big dent in it (not there before). He picked it up and drove home. In the office, he tried to get it to work but didn’t have the right cord. He was going to turf it when his colleagues said no, let’s try to find the owner.

In the case they found my boarding pass and a piece of paper “where I could just make out the words ‘Julie Bishop’,” said Billie.

She googled me and Julie Bishop, which led her to the Guardian. Which led her to me.

The world is a pretty great place.

• Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist