"It sounds like a good opportunity for you to flirt with gay dog walkers and house-cleaners," said Thomas.

I had told him about the office party for people who work on their own at home which Sara was holding in her front room and which I would be going to later that evening while he, as agreed, baby-sat our children.

"What do you mean?" I said, trying to sum up suitably affronted tone as dearly beloved accused me of being a flirt. "Anyway, Tony's not gay. He's married to our friend in case you'd forgotten."

Why is it that men, and Thomas in particular (apart from Sara's husband Peter who's equally bad), think any man (and in particular Tony, the gorgeous, muscular, urban house-cleaner who occasionally wields a feather duster) must be gay or, in Tony's case, any man who wields a feather duster for a living (or as my mother would say for pin money, while his wife Elsbeth the paediatrician is out earning serious industrial rivet money).

"I don't flirt," I said petulantly, as Thomas returned to his paper.

Thomas didn't answer directly but began reading from an article in his paper.

"Great flirts depend on their ability to get people to open up and talk," he said.

"They are experts in making other people talk, which works because everybody loves talking about themselves ..."

He put down the article headlined 'How to flirt with colleagues and influence them' and said to me "... which is exactly what you do."

"That's called being polite and making conversation," I pointed out.

"It's common sense to talk to relative strangers about things which they might actually want to or be able to talk about, rather than just blundering in and asking people if they saw the game last night."

The latter was a referral to the first thing Thomas ever said to me when we met at a party a very long time ago.

"That's a very effective chat-up line," said Thomas. "After all, if you hadn't been interested you wouldn't have talked to me about something you patently weren't interested in - or ended up marrying me."

"I only talked to you because I was writing a piece about whether men like women who like football, or whether they resent female encroachment on a traditionally male territory," I told him, possibly for the first time because he looked hurt and returned to his paper while I went to get ready for office party.

"So," said the George Clooney lookalike Macdoctor who had found the invitation to the party on my computer when he finished fixing it last week and more or less invited himself along. "What do you write when you're not writing party invitations?"

"This and that," I said, deflecting attention away from self and trying to think of something to ask that would allow me to find about a bit more about him. "You must discover a lot about people, rifling through their hidden files?"

"Well, I only bother rifling though their hard drive if they look like the sort of person who might have hidden files," he said.

"And do I look like the sort of person who might have hidden files?" I asked, unable to help myself.

He never did get to answer my perfectly innocent question about computer maintenance as Tim, our gay, dog walking friend appeared on the scene with a bottle in hand and began filling up our glasses before commenting on the party.

"What a fabulous idea of Sara's," he said. "Provides the perfect opportunity to get out of the house and flirt with the Macdoctor ..."