Tom the Pirate · The Cove of Lost Socks · story for a child who lost something · comforting story · bedtime story

This morning Moustache has a genuine crisis on his hands. With eight feet he needs sixteen socks, and he can only find three, none of them matching. Where do lost socks actually go? That, they say, is the greatest mystery in the whole sea. And just then, a map starts to shiver at the tip of the sail.

Sail to the cove where everything that gets lost comes back. So there really is, at the far end of the archipelago, an astonishing beach made not of sand but of socks: whole mountains of them, dunes with spots, with stripes, with stars. Every sock in the world that ever went missing washes up there. Little Léa has lost the red and white striped sock belonging to her teddy Nounours, who now has one cold foot.

But an old crab watches over all of it: the Keeper of Lost Socks, who has been sorting and filing for a hundred years. Moustache plunges his eight arms into a dune at random, sends socks flying everywhere and ends up squirting ink across the Keeper's whole filing system. Among forty-two thousand red and white striped socks, rummaging like that finds you nothing at all.

So Tom changes tack. He asks for help from the expert, the one who knows every single sock by heart. In a few seconds the Keeper lifts a dune and produces Nounours' very small sock, with its tiny bow on the side. His careful sorting was never there to annoy anyone, it was there so that lost things could be found and given back. Léa puts the sock back on her teddy, and the Keeper slips the smallest sock in the world into the chest: the tenth keepsake.

The lightest and funniest episode of the season, and a comforting bedtime story too. When you lose something you loved, you are allowed to be sad about it. But nothing is ever truly lost: it is simply tidied away somewhere else, safe and warm, waiting for someone to come and fetch it.

A screen-free bedtime story for children aged 3 to 5, good to share at bedtime, in the car, or before a nap. As always with Tilibou, the ending stays soft and quiet, with no music, to soothe the small sorrows of the day before the night. 🌙

👉 All the Tilibou bedtime stories at tilibou.com

💡 Tip: to listen to one world back-to-back, choose its season (Noisette, Léo, Cassie, Marin, Tom the Pirate, or the Christmas, Halloween and School seasons).

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