THERE'S no other explanation for it. I'm sure there's a magnetic forcefield around my body that makes all electrical objects self-destruct when I approach. Why else would everything I come into contact with break down mysteriously, all at the same time?

This was the bizarre chain of events in a few short weeks:

The car aerial stopped working;

The washing machine went mad and began spinning when it should have been drying;

The vacuum cleaner died;

The TV screen began to waver;

The car's ABS system went down.

Now, before you ask, I think ABS is short for Another Bucketload of Sterling, because I'm spending money like Roman Abramovich at the moment. I walk into electrical stores and get hordes of assistants hanging on my every word.

Last Saturday, I had to interrupt the washing machine salesgirl in full flow to ask her where the vacuums were kept as we informed her we had to buy both immediately. Maybe, they thought I was working for one of those reality property shows and was trying to equip a whole home. But the simple truth is that everything I now go near blows up or goes barmy.

Even the Star pages mysteriously disappeared from our system last week, leaving our IT experts scratching their heads and having to find replacement ones.

The washing machine was particularly frightening. We were in the kitchen one night when it suddenly went berserk and began leaping about. Do you remember that scene in Alien when a creature emerged from John Hurt's stomach? Well, it was like that, as something weird began straining inside the washload and banging up violently against the door.

And no, it wasn't my dirty socks.

Anyway, the machine magically calmed down and carried on working again as if nothing had happened. But a few days later, I returned home after fixing the latest fault on my car to find Mrs Editor's Chair waiting with grim news.

"The washer/dryer has stopped," she said. "I think we need a new one."

I was reaching down for my wallet, when she added: "Oh, and the vacuum has gone."

I went to seek consolation by watching telly, but the screen started moving from side to side, so I gave up.

What is the moral of this story? Well, I think I may have won Tony Blair a third term in office.

Think about it. Blair and Brown keep boasting about how strong the economy is. But where's all the money coming from, because no one I know has any?

I'll tell you it's from my pocket. I am single-handedly keeping the wheels of commerce in the UK going round by my enforced spending sprees.

I had to ring Barclaycard on Monday to ask them to send us two replacement credit cards because ours are so battered that the signatures have disappeared.

The guy on the phone told me he was going to send me this new-fangled chip and pin thingy-me-bob. Apparently, you stick the card in a machine and punch in a code to verify who you are.

It was only after I put the phone down that I realised it's going to end in tears. My forcefield is bound to set fire to the chip and pin machine and probably bring down the UK banking system in one go.

It's lucky that no one could ever accuse my writing of being electric... otherwise this page would be in flames right now as well.

Steve Cohen, Editor