"How Much Washing Up Is There?"

Now you can easily answer this question with reference to the handy, internationally recognised Soapy Scale:

1. You eat out every meal. The kitchen has never been used and is immaculately clean.

2. You’ve had a guest staying. Your guest has washed up. You’ve never seen the kitchen as clean as it is now.

3. You wash up while you cook, leaving the kitchen clean even before you start eating.

4. You wash up straight away after every course.

5. You wait until the whole meal is over, then you wash up straight away.

6. After your meal, you arrange dishes and pots in a pile in the sink, ready for the next morning, then you wash them.

7. You leave the pile in the sink until there’s something in it that you need to use. Like your cutlery.

8. The pile in the sink is making it hard to get a glass of water from the tap.

9. When you eventually get round to washing up, you find a pan at the bottom of the pile in the sink and you can’t remember which meal you used it for, or what you made.

10. You can’t remember using the pan at the bottom of the pile at all.

11. You don’t remember ever owning a pan like the one you find at the bottom of the pile in the sink.

12. It’s hard to work out exactly where the sink is.

13. You hear cries coming from the direction of the sink that sound like ‘Help me’.

14. The cries from the sink sound like ‘Help me’, but they’re in a foreign language you don’t understand, possibly Urdu.

15. Emails start appearing in your inbox from somebody calling himself ‘The Sinkman’. He's started an online casino.

16. You can’t get to the kitchen.

17. You can’t even find the kitchen.

18. You no longer own a kitchen, because you sold it to a scrap metal merchant.

19. You happen to catch 'Newsnight', and hear that current thinking is that Osama Bin Laden might be alive and well, and in your sink.

20. So is Elvis.