I WILL be candid with you here: I am the most chronically incompetent person I have ever met.

And I have met me many times (despite trying desperately to avoid such inevitably tense encounters).

You speak up on my behalf: "We're sure you're being too hard on yourself here. Besides, you're not competent to judge such matters."

Yes, thanks for that. Reminds me - true story - of the time when, during one of the never-ending crises of my life, a mate counselled: "Never mind, worse things happen at sea." Just as I was boarding a ferry.

Moving the conversation on from general incompetence to particular ineptitude, I must come clean about an activity at which I do not, to say the least, excel: to wit, cleaning.

How do cleaners do it? I've the strongest admiration for their profession and believe it would take me far longer than the regulation three or four years to get a degree in the subject.

I tried cleaning my friends' holiday home - to make it clean for the cleaner coming in - after a recent stay, and just made everything worse. Every time I turned around, there was more dirt where I'd just cleaned.

I tried cleaning the windows on my own semi-detached chateau and could barely see through them afterwards. I cleaned a small mark off my car seat and, next day, noticed a great wavy tide-mark marking the edge of the area where I'd taken the soapy cloth.

The game, madam, is a bogey. I don't know where Staines is - is it Middlesex?- but it sounds like the place for me. I haven't been there but I've got the ruined T-shirt already.

A curse on cleaning, which brings me to my point or at least to a germane item of news: a clumsy cleaner in Cairo has broken off Tutankhamun's beard.

Worse still, her husband tried repairing the damage to the pharaoh's burial mask, using cheap superglue from a DIY store. "They'll never notice," one imagines him telling the missus. Cue headlines around the world.

The incident need not imply that the cleaner under advisement is incompetent at the actual wiping, scrubbing and mopping. Just that she was a little clumsy on this occasion.

There's nothing valuable to break in my house - seriously, the two vases on the mantelpiece are from pound-shops (I just liked them and wanted to see if they'd fool posh pals) - but I couldn't afford a cleaner anyway.

A mate of mine says, these days, they arrive with a professorial air and are disparaging of equipment that isn't top notch. Quite right. Cleaning is a noble calling, even if it is a dirty business.