WHEN your Monday starts with you nearly getting run over by a bus on a zebra crossing, you know your week can only get better.

Except it hasn’t.

That’s because I’ve had to say goodbye to a dear loved one this week.

Someone who has been with me through thick and thin, helping me out in times of trouble, mainly after evening meals but most importantly post dinner parties when faced with a sink full of dishes and a rather fuzzy head.

Yes our dishwasher has gone to the scrap heap following ten years of loyal service and I’m rather sad about it.

I’m not particularly sad about having a new dishwasher, you know, one that actually washes cups and bowls without leaving ropey old brown lines through them.

Or the fact that I no longer have to put up with the constant pinging of the blades swiping across a large plate that the Beautiful Wife has put in the middle of the dishwasher rather than to the side, where they’re supposed to go.

What I will miss is the challenge.

The challenge of placing all the utensils required to not only cook a family of five their tea for the night but also for them to eat it.

I am most definitely going to miss that.

Our new dishwasher is so big and practical that I could fit in a whole kitchen’s worth of stuff in there and it would still clean it pristinely in half the time, and no doubt with double the economic efficiency as well.

Where’s the fun in that.

No more balancing spatulas on dishes, facing them forwards, rather than backwards, so they doesn’t touch any of the cutlery. Or positioning one bowl at the right 45 degree angle on top of another bowl because one degree out will leave dried on weetabix for me to chisel off later in the sink.

This was my domain, my job, and I was really good at it.

The Beautiful Wife would try and stack the dishwasher and almost always the contents would come out dirty. Rather guiltily, this made me happy.

There isn’t a lot I can do better than the BW apart from having a pee standing up, and....no that’s about it actually.

But there was of course, stacking the dishwasher. I was the king of the stackers, the world champion, the grandmaster, if it was an Olympic competition I would have been the Michael Phelps of stacking dishwashers.

But now even that’s gone. Anyone can stack our dishwasher now. You could literally throw it all in hickledy pickledy and it would still clean everything to such a shiney state you have to wear sunglasses when you unload it.

I thought about finding another skill, and for a brief time I thought matching the socks up from the washing pile might be my new thing. I appeared to be pretty adept at locating a sock, finding its pair pretty quickly and then putting them away in each of the children’s respective wardrobes in record speed.

Then I discovered the BW could do that twice as quick as me, it’s just that she found it really boring and so gave the job to me.

So like the old dishwasher I find myself slightly redundant at the moment, tasked with the jobs no one wants rather the ones only I can do.

At least I didn’t get knocked down by that bus!

NEIL D’ARCY-JONES

What My Kids Said This Week: “You mean even I can stack the dishwasher now.”

Me: “Let’s not go crazy now!”