With her usual exquisite timing, my wife waits until I'm having a quick lie-down on the landing floor before suddenly descending (or I suppose ascending) upon the scene of my homely Saturday morning drudgery, where only moments earlier she might have found me performing vigorous thrusts with a toilet brush or removing unsightly hairs from the plughole trap.

'Keeping busy?' she asks. I tell her I might have just tweaked something, but then wasn't it the Greeks (and here Plato and Diogenes etc part company with the Readers' Digest school of philosophy) who suggested that a frown only uses up more muscles than a smile if you're busy cleaning a bathroom at the same time?

In fact, as I continue rather too cheerfully (against the grain of my wife's own frown), why else would they name one of their leading epic heroes after a popular household scouring agent? Wasn't it Ajax who went mad and ran on to his own sword rather than spend the rest of his life suffering from lower-back pain aggravated by reaching into those difficult yellowy areas to the rear of the lavatorial pedestal where male children of the family to this day direct their urinary emissions?

My wife gazes down at me. 'Don't forget the door,' she says, by which she means the ridiculous drawbridge-style cupboard under our washbasin, which has taken to suddenly crashing down when it senses bare feet in the room.