Tim Dowling: our house is destined to be dirty for ever …

My wife asked for a new stair carpet for Christmas, which made things easy for me: all I had to do was print out a picture of some stairs with carpet on them, put it in an envelope and stick a bow on it. Basically I was saying: order some carpet in January, and I will pay.

But with the arrival of the new year I discover a problem with this plan: we simply aren’t done ruining the old stair carpet. Yes, the cat has sharpened its claws on it, and the old dog has peed on it, and the new dog has peed on it in imitation of the old dog, and moths have attacked its upper reaches. But it could be worse, and as yet we have no practical strategy that would stop the same things happening to a new stair carpet.

“It’s not just the stair carpet, it’s everything,” my wife says. She means: the muddy paw prints on our duvet, the lakes of tortoise pee on the kitchen floor, the little tumbleweeds of cat fur that blow through the living room on draughts of cold air.

Until such time as we figure out how to stem the tide of damage, we have no business owning nice things. My Christmas present of a picture of a stair carpet is beginning to seem like a hollow gesture. I mean an even more hollow gesture.

It is a wet Wednesday afternoon, and the dirty house is empty. I have a strong desire to take an afternoon nap in my bed, instead of slumped in my office chair, so I creep upstairs with a book and shut the door. After two pages, I slip into unconsciousness.

When I wake up the room is pitch black and a dog is standing on my chest licking my face. The dog’s face, I notice, is caked in wet sand.

“Ugh,” I say. “Have you been digging in the bunker of an abandoned golf course?”

“Yes!” my wife says, from downstairs.

“Please stop,” I say to the dog. The light flicks on.

“Why have you let the dog on the bed?” my wife says.

“I haven’t,” I say. “This was unplanned.”

“You’ve got to shut the door when you’re in here,” she says. “We agreed.”

“I did shut the door,” I say. “But the latch is broken.”

“Right,” she says. “I was going to wash this stuff anyway. Help me take the duvet cover off.”

I return to my office, but an hour later my wife comes out to find me.

“The washing machine is doing that thing where it stops for no reason and the door won’t open,” she says.

“There’s a procedure,” I say, “but I can’t remember what it is.”

I find the washing machine paused mid-rinse, half full of water. I manage to open the door, rearrange the wet bedclothes and restart the machine.

“Problem solved,” I say, and return to my office. Soon, my wife is back.

“It stopped again,” she says.

I follow her across the garden to the house, where I find the washing machine paused at the same point in the cycle. This time, however, it’s displaying an error code. I type the code into my phone.

“Mystery blockage,” I say to my wife. “Or pump jammed, or possibly broken.”

“You’ve got to fix it,” she says. “If we don’t have a washing machine, we really are fucked.”

And so, crouched with my phone on my knee showing a YouTube repair tutorial, I gain access to the rubber hose that allows me to drain the machine manually, into a series of roasting tins from the oven. Then, with a certain apprehension that comes from reaching a point of no return, I remove the pump cover exactly as the man in the video demonstrates. Soapy water flows round my shoes.

Twenty minutes later I find my wife in the kitchen.

“Well?” she says. Without a word I pour two handfuls of shiny coins onto the table.

“That’s £7.36 in total,” I say. “Plus two plectrums and a US penny.”

“Where was it?” she says.

“In the pump,” I say.

“Wow,” she says. “I wonder what made it decide to stop at precisely this moment?”

“I just think this is the maximum amount of money it can hold,” I say. “They should print it on the front of the machine.”

“So it works?” she says.

“It works fine now, yeah,” I say. We both stare at the pile of wet coins, glistening as if freshly minted.

“What should we buy?” my wife says.

“I just want to look at them,” I say. “They’re so clean.”