My Aunt once pointed out that in most pictures taken in my Mum's house there is some reference to washing. Whether it be a pile of clothes, or a clothes-line, or the ironing-board or whatever, somehow there is usually something lurking in the background, almost like a Hitchcockian motif. It's not just my Mum who has a bit of an obsession with laundry either - my Gran likes to get her clothes up on the line as early in the day as she can. Actually, my Gran has a very early form of rotary dryer in her back garden. It is made to the same basic design as your modern rotating clothes line but rather than being produced in a handy lightweight aluminium, seems to have been forged from solid steel. There is a handle on the thing which I spent many a childhood Summer holiday trying (in vain) to turn; I haven't tried it in a long time, and probably never will since failing to turn a clothes line can be a lot more disheartening when you're in your thirties.

All this is of course but a precursor to the revelation that if there is such a thing as 'the washing gene' then the inheritance in this generation seems to have gone to me. The Doctor Who fans amongst you will doubtless be familiar with the seventh Doctor tale, "The Curse of Fenric" which basically hinges on this very idea (albeit with less laundry). With that in mind you can doubtless imagine the horror that reverberated around the Curnow household recently when the washing-machine packed up.

Actually, 'packed up' is a bit of a misnomer here. (Pause while Andrew ticks 'misnomer' off his list of pretentious words he wants to force into his columns no matter what.) It didn't so much stop working as go into overdrive. The spin cycle on our machine has always been fairly furious, but one evening it became positively livid, spinning around as though trying to break Einstein's light speed barrier and thus make our washing clean before we had even got it dirty. Accompanying this hyperspeed spin was an even more alarming smell of something that, if not exactly burning, was certainly getting more than a little warm. My brother once set fire to a chip-pan, and the tea towel he used to douse it forever after retained a faint smoky tinge - and the clothes that emerged from the washing machine this particular evening had that same distinctive scent.

I have to admit that this isn't the first washing machine that has broken in my presence (I refuse to type, 'that I have broken' despite the overwhelming evidence to that effect). When my brother and I moved into a flat in 1991 it came with a washing machine installed. After maybe nine months or so the machine became alarmingly noisy, again at the spin-cycle end of the wash. Not that I know much about washing machines, but it sounded as if whatever held the drum in place wasn't doing its job, with the result that the spinning drum was banging against the inside of the machine casing at a very alarming speed. At least, that's certainly what it sounded like from the sitting-room, to which I would regularly retreat once the machine got going. Although, thinking about it now, if the drum had burst free from the casing it would probably have come straight through the sitting-room wall and out the other side before it started to lose momentum, so maybe the pub across the road would have been a more sensible place for a tactical withdrawal.

As an aside, that machine did eventually give up the ghost (or did we decide that our nerves could no longer take it?) and after a period of uncertainty as to whether it would be the landlady or the poor, underpaid tenants who should pay for a replacement, a new machine was bought, paid for entirely by the landlady. Curiously, our parents came to visit the very day the machine arrived, and at odd times over the years I have wondered whether some arrangement was reached covertly between landlady and parents. Like Tom Baker in "Logopolis" I've never quite had the nerve to ask...

The other washing machine that I broke-- D'oh! The other washing machine that coincidentally broke while I was in the vicinity, was at my in-laws' house. Again, I'm not prepared to admit to liability, and it turned out to be just the remains of somebody's watch that was blocking up the inlet pipe. Admittedly it is true that I lost my watch at around the same time, but I refuse to be condemned on such flimsy circumstantial evidence.

But anyway, back to the twenty-first century, and my current kitchen. Watching "The Simpsons" not that long ago, we laughed at Homer's line, "Extended warranty - how can I lose?" used to indicate how dumb he is. This was in the classic episode where he is getting Moe to knock a crayon up his nose to make him stupid (no I'm not making it up - Moe describes this backstreet operation as "the old Crayola Oblongata!"). So imagine the high-scores on the irony-o-meter when we discovered that we had in fact taken out extended warranty on our washing machine. Woohoo!! It runs out in November, by the way, so up till then it can go wrong as often as it likes! The engineer came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with the bearings (yeah, whatever, just fix it) and a whole new drum was duly fitted.

I can happily report that the new drum works perfectly, and we are now back to full operating capacity on the washing front. However, having been without a working machine, and lacking the energy or the inclination to take a couple of rocks down to the riverbank (plus also lacking the riverbank) for nearly a fortnight, the scale of our washing pile can easily be imagined. With good reason I started referring to it by Bonnie Langford's wonderful line, "The Vervoids' revolting compost-heap" (a description that could equally be applied to this very column).

The pile of soiled laundry is now, after a few days where we seemed to be channelling the service-wash spirits of Pauline Fowler and Dot Cotton, back to manageable size, and even as we speak there is a load of pink synthetics (programme 2, 40 degree wash, 800 CC spin, 38 minutes in total) on the washing-line in the back garden.

Maybe I should go and have my photo taken with it...