Thomas has helped heal the rift which has grown between friend Sara and self.

I had asked if Tony - the muscular, good-looking housecleaner who has been doing for her (doing what no one is quite sure) since she was seduced by his charms and French polishing skills at a party earlier this year - might also "do" for me.

"I genuinely only want him to clean the pigsty," I protested, in response to her moodiness whenever the subject came up.

"Are you suggesting he does more than that for me?" she snapped, which indeed I was, as her mood swings, between radiant on the days Tony comes and glum on the days he does not, seemed to suggest it anyway.

"Not at all," I said. "It's just whenever I try to get a handle on the accumulated dirt of the past, one of my editors seems to phone. And now they all have the impression the reason I have a problem with deadlines is because I spend all my time vacuuming."

"Well, you'll certainly have a problem with deadlines if Tony pitches up," she said, seeming to suggest herself that he did more than dust busting at her place.

"How's your work going?" I asked, changing the subject to a subject which in hindsight was not the best subject to change it to.

"It's not," she replied. "No one seems to be interested in anything I suggest at the moment."

Sara is/was a TV documentary maker who made a lot of in-depth investigative programmes for the BBC but is now having problems trying to get anything commissioned.

"If it's not about finding the latest pop idol or soap star, they're not interested," she complained.

"And if they encourage everyone to become soap stars and pop idols there won't be anyone left to do real jobs."

"Perhaps you should suggest a programme which would encourage people to do real jobs," I mooted.

"Plumbers or engineers, for example, and you could get people from all over the country to stand in queues waiting to demonstrate their washer-changing skills and the winner gets his own van ..."

Or urban housecleaners," said Sara, returning to the subject which I'd been trying to steer clear of.

"And I could get the best-looking urban housecleaner to come and clean my house."

"I thought you'd already done that," I said, prompting the same moody silence that I'd experienced every time I'd brought up the possibility of her giving me Tony's number.

Fortunately for our friendship, husband Thomas has come up with his own solution to the mess that is our home.

He arrived home one day with a box which he said was a present for "us" and was obviously too large to be two tickets to Venice, with baby-sitting vouchers thrown in.

It was, in fact, a vacuum cleaner of the very expensive turbo-driven bagless variety, which Thomas explained was a remarkable piece of engineering - so remarkable that even he, macho man who fears even considering a domestic chore would damage his virility, could forget that its purpose was essentially to carry out a domestic chore now and then.

After he'd finished using all his inherent male putting-things-together skills to assemble it, he demonstrated its turbo suction power by "blasting" (his word, mine would have been vacuuming) the dust mites which have been squatting around the edges our house even before we took up residence.