Dinner with Sara and Peter proved to be more relaxing than usual, due to some sort of truce between them not to wind each other up over their respective careers.

Peter is a TV executive, who commissions programmes for a major television channel, while Sara is a freelance documentary maker, who has most of her ideas thwarted, after months of initial work, by the likes of Peter.

Peter was in a particularly happy mood, as he had managed to secure a series with a major actor/comedian - thus depriving other channels, desperate to put out anything with major actor/comedian, of his talents.

And Sara was happy, due to having received several visits from Tony, the muscular house-cleaner/odd-job man who was now a weekly feature (and this week, as we were coming to dinner, a twice-weekly feature) in her diary.

Even Peter seemed to have welcomed Tony into the family set-up with open arms. He'd never actually met him but I could overhear him raving to husband about the tasks he'd performed, while the two of them busied themselves with wine pouring.

"I think you might actually be able to sit down this evening," Peter was saying to Thomas, "without getting covered in cat's hair or mashed banana or impaling yourself on a bit of Buzz Lightyear."

"Has Sara been having a bit of a spring clean then?" asked Thomas, who would never presume that anyone other than Sara, such as Peter for instance, might have had a bit of a spring clean and who seemed totally unperturbed by Peter's frequent digs at Sara's inability to keep the house in a state in which most people would like to live.

"Not Sara," said Peter. "Some effeminate cleaner chap she met at a party.

"Apparently his wife is a cutting-edge paediatrician and he earns pin money cleaning and doing the odd odd-job."

At this point I decided that, if Thomas was so busy helping with wine pouring, I would go and "help" Sara, who had disappeared to kitchen to see about dinner.

I found her admiring a worthy-of-Delia casserole, which she was about to put into oven but kept out in time to give me a quick look, before it was cooked.

"Another of Tony's hidden talents," she smiled, nodding towards casserole.

"He concocted it when he was here yesterday, in between creating order in the girl's bedroom and filling in that hole you always catch your heels in on the front door step."

"Is this Tony the same effeminate cleaner chap I just caught Peter talking to Thomas about?" I queried, wondering what she would make of her husband's description of the man for whose weekly two-hourly visits she spent most of the rest of the week preparing.

"I never told Peter he was effeminate," she protested. "He just assumed in his 'any man who has ever so much as set eyes on a vacuum cleaner must be' way. And I didn't bother to put him straight."

"Just as well," I said, admiring casserole at the same time. If he knew he was really as tasty as this casserole looks, he might want to go back to the days of sofas covered in banana and Buzz Lightyear."

"Mmmmm," replied Sara, either in response to above observation or because she was miles away thinking of Tony, in his short-sleeved T-shirt wrestling with the shower head in a touching display of manly strength, mingled with a desire to make the bathroom spotless, which showed he was not afraid of his feminine side ...