Concern first grips you as you slide back the wardrobe door and look to that place where the item of clothing you have decided to wear normally hangs. Noting its absence, you flick aside everything else in the wardrobe, panic building as it continues to elude you.

Abandoning any pretence of self-control, you then leap into the wardrobe and start ripping coats off hangers and tossing trousers over your shoulder, wondering at the odour that suddenly assaults your nostrils. You then notice the very old pair of tracksuit pants curled in the corner, looking and smelling like a long dead wombat. Making a mental note to bury or burn them, you keep searching for the absent item. Nothing.

Perhaps they are in Wardrobe B.

Wardrobe B is a sartorial version of the elephants' graveyard, that place where clothes go to die. Put another way, it is where I keep all the clothes in which I wouldn't be seen dead. Chief among these is the leather coat the Russian con man gave me in return for allowing him to fleece my wallet. If you ever are walking past the Kremlin in Moscow and a silver-haired man driving an Alfa Romeo tries to give you a free leather coat because he has a sister in Melbourne and likes Australians, clutch your wallet to your chest and run the other way.

Wardrobe B, alas, yields nothing. Dry cleaning is a possible option, the fumes in dry cleaning shops having the ability to completely delete my memory banks. As soon as I walk out of a dry cleaning store, I forget I've been there. Weeks later as my wardrobe dwindles, I slink into the dry cleaning store and ask if they possibly have anything in my name. Minutes later I can be seen leaving the store a hundred dollars poorer and laden with the pile of freshly laundered suits and trousers that has accumulated over the past months.

So I checked with the dry cleaner but there was neither joy nor suit nor jumper to be found. Perhaps he was holding out on me. He could well have a thriving business in secondhand suits running from the back of his shop. You could clothe a suburb with the assorted items of apparel I have lost and often I have wondered whether the dry cleaners of this city are joined in a web of used-clothes conspiracy.

Confide in someone that you have lost a suit and they regard you with suspicion, presuming that after a night of bacchanalian excess, you have woken up on a bench in King George Square sans suit and clad only in socks and jocks.