I don’t know what I’d do without our dishwasher. If I had to use my own time to gather up reasonably clean glasses, some of which have only had a splash of water in them, and coat them in a hard patina of scum, I simply have no idea how I’d cope.

It’s great that someone went to the trouble to invent such a device. In the old days, you’d have had to fill a bowl with warm, soapy water, add a load of, I don’t know, grit or sand it looks like, then swill your glasses around in them and leave them to dry to a rock-hard crust.

Thank heavens for the industrial revolution that gave us such labour-saving devices! I would also like to shake the hand of the person who invented our kitchen worktop, which is absolutely impossible to wipe down without leaving swirls and whorls of smearing.

And are you the chap who designed the door to our fridge? Then let me shake you by the hand also, sir! It must have taken weeks of careful planning to ensure that the door doesn’t quite close properly when I push it to, generally resulting in it being open a tiny hair’s breadth all day and me getting a ticking off when I get in from work.

Speaking of kitchen doors, perhaps the same person also did the drawers that operate on some fancy principle that allows them to slide seamlessly and noiselessly home at the merest flick of a finger... apart from the last quarter of an inch. Now that’s precision engineering for you!

I also love the way that the toilet has one of those push-button flushers, and when you press it in and walk away, it contrives to stick, causing the toilet to issue forth a gurgling and a flobbling (is that a word? It should be) such as you’ve never heard, until you trundle back upstairs to push it again. What larks!

Nothing, you will have gathered by now, works the way it should do. Or if it does, it doesn’t do it for long. I can remember proudly watching an engineer install a new boiler for us.

“Well, at least that’ll last us,” I said. He looked at me askance. “Yeah, for about eight or nine years. That’s the life expectancy of this model.”

Which, now I think about it, was probably about seven years ago. So that’s something else giving up the ghost we can look forward to.

Of course, some people (and I’m looking at you, dear wife) might say that it’s not the things that are going wrong, but the way I’m using them. Some people might say I should just push the fridge door a bit harder. Some people might say I might put a bit more elbow grease into wiping down the kitchen surfaces.

Some people, I admit, might not be too wide of the mark there.

But I will maintain to my dying day that the dishwasher is rubbish all on its own, without any help at all from me.