Sniffing an article of clothing from the wrong pile could cause your head to snap back with significant force. I am now paying the price for employing this test as I suffer from occasional neck pain. I am convinced it also permanently damaged my sense of smell to the point where these days my nose can barely tell the difference between its Fourexes and Toohey's Lites.

I would, in those days, wallow in my untidiness and sometimes have trouble finding my bed amid the mounds of shirts, socks and underdaks that littered the bedroom landscape.

I remember that house. It was the one in which I came home late one night to find my then-girlfriend in bed. Not in my bed, as it happened, but in my mate's, which wouldn't have mattered so much if he hadn't also been in it at the time. You win a few and you lose a few and, as I heard that the dear, sweet thing later moved to Hong Kong where she distinguished herself by sleeping with the entire male expatriate population, our parting might well have been fortuitous.

My point is that I was untidy, as blokes tend to be, but am now much improved which brings me to Sean the Irishman who came last week to lay a wooden floor in our living room. We left Sean and his helper to their labours and went out for the day, returning later to pay them. There'd been a problem, Sean explained, as his vacuum cleaner had expired and he'd had to use ours.

This he had found by rummaging through the apartment until he unearthed it. We knew this because all the cupboard and wardrobe doors were still open and our vacuum cleaner was lying in the middle of the floor. "My God, that's a noisy machine!" he exclaimed as we eyed the vacuum cleaner which was now coated in dust.

The pair packed their gear and as they drove off we walked in to the kitchen where they had made a cup of tea - quite a few cups, actually, as evidenced by the pile of dirty cups littering the bench and the small mountain of used tea bags, still oozing tannin, piled in the sink.

Then we walked into my bedroom, the door to which I had closed when we'd left that morning. Sean had opened it, presumably in his search for the noisy vacuum cleaner, and left it open. Then he'd started his grinding machine to level the cement slab on which he was laying the floor and filled the entire place with a fine, grey cement dust several millimetres thick.

As he had been thoughtful enough to also leave my wardrobe doors open, all my clothes were now covered with grey powder. We sat down on my bed and cuddled as a cloud of dust rose from the doona, billowing and swirling through the room.

I wondered if, by any chance, he'd emptied the bag on the vacuum cleaner. He hadn't and it was full of the same, grey, clinging dust. He must have stood back and admired his work at one point, leaning against the white wall as he did so, which would explain the huge, black handprints.

As we piled the doona cover into the washing machine, washed the cups, emptied the vacuum bag, scrubbed the wall, dumped numerous used tea bags and wrote our names in the thick dust on the table, I realised that Sean was in fact me in my other, single life.