A word with a lawyer. We are talking divorce, and, among other things, arrangements for childcare.“The point is that you have
to have a place which can accommodate your children which is not too far removed, in comfort and amenities, from the home they're growing up in with their mother."

This, it occurs to me, is a tall order. How many divorced men live in quarters as spacious as the ones they have been obliged to desert? Inevitably, my thoughts drift towards the Hovel. Location, say the estate agents, is all. But there are other aspects of a home.

When I first entered the Hovel, it immediately struck me that here was a place that was not for home-owning adults. The bed of a grown-up householder projects into the middle of the room, so that it can be approached from each side; students, prisoners, monks and children have beds jammed against the wall, approachable from only one direction. It is so in the Hovel.

And no one could mistake the Hovel for a child-friendly environment. It certainly falls down, in comparison with the family home, in the number of rooms, size of rooms, number of pianos, number of pussycats, number of gardens, number of floors that do not slope at 15 degrees out of the horizontal, and number of bathrooms where the lights actually work.

This last is the latest in a line of entropic events that characterise the domestic these days. Remember: we are all in the unshakeable grip of the second law of thermodynamics, which means, basically, that everything falls to bits and the bits never reassemble themselves in any useful way.
There was the time when the telly suddenly stopped working; Razors and I, mystified as to the cause, took this stoically, as men do, and so did nothing about it except look at static for a couple of months. "Fixed the telly yet?" he would ask on his return from work. "No," I would reply, and this Beckettian dialogue went on for some time, even when children would come and also, in their rather more strident way, ask if anyone had fixed the telly yet. In the end, we discovered that there was no aerial on the roof; this rather baffled the TV repairman, until we worked out that the previous tenant had been mooching the signals off the neighbour's rig, and when the neighbour changed his system, he disconnected us.

The bathroom light is another matter, though. This had always made a disconcerting fizzing noise when on, but I thought little about it; electricity should make a fizzing noise, like in old Frankenstein films. When the light stopped working but the fizzing noise continued, I thought I'd better investigate. Unscrewing the globular ceiling lampshade, I discovered it was full - quite full - of water. I wondered to myself how much, on a scale of one to ten, a light-bulb socket immersed in water counted as a health and safety hazard. Ten? Eleven?

The latest theory is that it is down to the decayed grouting in the upstairs shower, which allows excess splashy water to run down through the body of the house. (The downstairs bathroom is unusable qua bathroom, in that the bath has a leak which only the entire rebuilding of the Hovel, or the Deathtrap, would fix. But you can still use the sink.)

So now, in short, I have to take my contact lenses out in the kitchen; there is a mirror propped up by the chopping board for this purpose. New visitors to the Hovel see this mirror in its unusual place and assume that this is an indicator of druggy decadence; they raise their eyebrows suggestively, but are gently disabused. It's odd, though, how taking contact lenses out in the kitchen is much more problematic than doing the same in a bathroom. I've now lost three left contact lenses in as many weeks, which is playing havoc with my supply of monthlies.

I discovered, some while ago, that the monthly contact lens is a con even worse than the sell-by date on a jar of honey; I managed to keep using the same pair of monthlies for five years. I thought I had enough to keep me going until the year 2020, but now - for want of a bit of grouting - all my plans are dust.Back to the children. As it turns out, they have come to love the Hovel, and look on it as a combination of pirate's lair and funhouse. Indeed, what with the removal, at some point in the 1960s, of a supporting beam, many people comment on the similarity of the Hovel to the crazily tilted house in the Bosco dei Mostri in Bomarzo. You haven't seen it? Next time you're in Lazio, you absolutely must. But if you can't afford the flight to Italy, just pop round. If you dare.