I then store the wine bottles alongside those full of wine so when I stagger in from my jog, reach inside the fridge door and take a huge infusion of liquid, I've got a 50-50 chance of experiencing a swift ingestion of cold chardonnay. This, I recall, was one of the less appreciated virtues of solo living - you can drink from the bottle and nobody shrieks "Pig!" and hurls a saucepan at you.

The gods of chance failed to smile on this day that I grabbed the water bottle, and as I stood there gulping it occurred to me that my feet were wet. "Funny," I thought. "I haven't dribbled a drop." Alternatively, I had sprung a leak, but a quick check revealed no evidence of incontinence.

"The fridge!" I yelled, for it is the habit of our fridge, which pre-dates World War II, to spontaneously defrost and dump puddles of water on the floor. The treatment for this is to get on my hands and knees and, with a sponge, soak up the water which has pooled in the bottom of the fridge before it overflows and creates a mini-waterfall as it sloshes onto the floor. This allows me, when polite conversation turns to interior decorating trends, to tell people that we have a water feature in the kitchen.

I detest the soaking-up routine and was about to reach deep into the mental locker in which I store my most vituperative language when I noticed that the water was not coming from the fridge, but from one of the cupboards. Ever so carefully, I prised open the door and peered inside. Aaarrrggghhh! The cupboard resembled an inland sea. I stood for several seconds, head stuck in the under-bench cupboard and buttocks protruding from the door as my mind clunked over. Cupboards? Water? How?

I've never believed those TV ads in which paper towels absorb enough water to fill a small swimming pool. I should have, and it is worth noting that as part of our new household budget we have been shopping in large, rather than small, quantities. Accordingly, we had but a few days previously purchased half-a-dozen rolls of paper towelling at a never-to-be-repeated price. Each of these had now absorbed several megalitres of water and had inflated like giant party balloons.

I hauled one out but it was too heavy to hold and it fell to the floor. Splot! It must have weighed 20 kilos. There was nothing left to do but panic. The apartment would flood, the carpets would be ruined and I'd have to spend the rest of my life carrying my wife on my shoulders. Abandon ship! Take to the life boats! Women and children last!

When I eventually tired of running around the kitchen shrieking like a school girl, I rang my plumber who told me that he would be free to drop around towards the end of the year. I explained that unless Brisbane's dams ran dry within the next few hours, that was probably going to be too long to wait. "Use bath towels," he said.

A frenzied attack on the Yellow Pages unearthed a plumber who, incredibly, would be able to come around the next morning. "Use bath towels," he said, and it was then that I understood what had seemed like your average plumber's unhealthy obsession with my bathing habits.

The plumber arrived the next morning, swam across the kitchen, stuck his head in the cupboard, made several trips to his ute and hit me up for $98.