Given the nicks in the edge of the blade, it appeared that the damsel in question had been spectacularly hirsute. Banishing unwanted visions of bearded women, I packed and checked and rechecked the room. I always recheck the room and yet never fail to arrive home minus a shirt or a sock or a pair of jocks, underwear scattered in hotels from Melbourne to Moscow.

I excelled myself in Holland and left a boot behind. It arrived in Australia three months after I did and there was much rejoicing when the left boot was reunited with the right for a man tires of the jibes he suffers when he has a boot on one foot and a thong on the other.

Hotel safes are especially handy for protecting valuables from their owners and there have been times when I've gone to pay the bill to discover I'd lost my wallet. Only when the room has been dismantled do I remember that the wallet is still locked in the safe, protected by the secret combination I had set and which I had now forgotten.

You never, however, leave behind those items with which you would be only too happy to part. I'd never, for example, leave behind my Boxing Day shirt.

I'd worn it on Boxing Day a couple of years ago because it was a particularly treasured item of clothing which a friend had bought for me in Italy. It gave me, I thought, a certain European air whenever I wore it. Not everyone agreed with this assessment and there were those who expressed the view, too freely in my opinion, that it made me look like a complete wally.

Unfazed by such harsh judgement, I wore it to a Boxing Day barbecue and had not been there 30 minutes when I splashed red wine over it.

In a laudable exhibition of self control, I managed to contain my rage and, inquiring politely of the host as to the whereabouts of the laundry, I doused the affected area of the shirt in table salt and washed it in cold water. Salt, I knew, was what you used to deal with red wine spillage, having over the years spilt the equivalent of the annual Margaret River grape harvest. I then tossed it in the dryer, waited 10 minutes and put it back on.

"You're a bloody genius," I said to myself, rejoining the barbecue in my shirt to the usual mutterings of "wanker" and "what a tosser". "Jealous," I said to myself. "They're all green with envy." Ten minutes later I upended another glass of red wine, this one brimful, over the same shirt. I took this rather badly, walking around the back of the house and giving the host's wheelie bins a severe kicking.

Feeling marginally better after thrashing the wheelie bins into submission I conceded defeat, tossed the shirt into a bucket of water and borrowed a T-shirt.

The next day the host rang to say that the bucket into which I had thrown the shirt had contained bleach and that the shirt now looked as if it had been tie-dyed by an overzealous hippy with a taste for Italian labels. The Boxing Day shirt, now being expendable, would never be left behind in a hotel room.

So I checked out on this day, looking around the room and double checking the bathroom. Nothing. When I got home I discovered that the mobile phone I thought I had left in my kitchen was still in the hotel room along with my new-for-this-summer black Speedo swimmers.

The loss of the Speedos I took as a fashion tip from Above, for I had noted over summer that I was the only male on the eastern seaboard who still wore what are known in the vernacular as "sluggos". After enduring remarks such as "I didn't know they still made those" over summer, I had been forced to concede that perhaps Speedos no longer ruled supreme in beach haute couture.

If the housekeeper came upon my black Speedos hanging behind the bathroom door, she was welcome to them, I explained when I rang the hotel. "I'll tell her," came the reply in a voice which may have been tinged with just a touch of sarcasm. "I'm sure she'll be delighted."

I was, however, keen to be reunited with my mobile phone. I'd inadvertently drowned its predecessor, a legacy of my habit of leaving a glass of water on the bedside table. My efforts to resuscitate it with a hairdryer provided only a temporary extension of life and it expired shortly afterwards. My girlfriend took pity on me and gave me one of her cast-offs when negotiations with Telstra foundered on the delicate matter of how much I still owed on that which had deceased.