THE great washing machine disaster went undetected until it was too late. Not until it was over was there even the faintest suggestion that anything was wrong. No unusual noises in the drum.

Nothing seeping through the seals. No clue of any kind. It just happened. Behind closed doors and in the dead of night, unnoticed from start to finish.

The seeds of the chaos were sown the night before. I hadn’t got round to doing the laundry during the day, so chucked a load in before I went to bed. And, not wanting to hang it all up before I went to work next morning, I set the machine to do a wash and dry. And right there and then, my fate was sealed.

As soon as I opened the door the next morning, I saw it. Lying in the doorwell, battered and bruised – the pen.

Or rather, the remains of the pen, now no more than a molten mess. A spent cartridge, if you like, at the end of a spectacular bloodbath.

I scarcely dared look at the clothes, but in I went and for a moment – just a moment – it didn’t look too bad. I picked over the wreckage and pulled out the first victim, a simple grey T-shirt that had a noticeable, but small, blue blot on the shoulder.

Salvageable with a spot of Vanish, I thought. My spirits lifted. And then I turned it over. There, across the front of the top, the dastardly device had done its worst, spewing out ink with a haphazard gusto that would not have looked out of place 20 years ago on Art Attack.

Next out were some light walking trousers, which escaped relatively unharmed, but only because they had been shielded by one of my favourite shirts, a white one with pale blue stripes. If there was an emblematic victim in all of this, it was that shirt, a poor, simple garment that had well and truly taken the brunt of the violence. Imagine a firing squad armed with paintball guns and you’ll get a rough idea of its fate.

I don’t blame the pen. It wasn’t his fault. Nope, I blame the washing machine, clearly getting its own back for a column I wrote here 18 months ago. Back then, I took a pop at the infernal appliance for mangling my shirts so much that ironing had become about as easy as scaling the Matterhorn.

This was clearly its revenge, served not cold, but fatally hot.

So I did the only things I could. I swore, I raged against the machine for a few minutes, and then I decided to write about it.

That, you see, is what happens when you write a newspaper column. Your own misery just becomes masochistic material. So as I munched on my breakfast, I found myself thinking up witticisms to make the sorry story a little less tragic.

Which is why I now tell people that, overnight, I have gone from being a white collar worker to a blue collar worker.

And why I say it was quite apt that I briefly turned the air blue – as everything else had gone that way as well.

And why I find myself regretting that I don’t have a pinstripe suit, as it could have matched my pen-stripe shirt.

And why I feel finally convinced that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, if only because not even one as bungling as I could put a sword in the laundry.

Except that last one wasn’t very witty. So I gave up trying to see the funny side. And just went to buy some new shirts instead.