My washing machine is haunted.

Two months ago one of my husband’s black socks went missing. That in itself is not unusual, but since he is a creature of habit and always buys the same brand and colour it never takes long for a stray to find a new partner. The strange thing this time was the presence of the intruder – a single sock, jauntily striped in shades of lime, emerald and olive. I stowed it at the back of his sock drawer, on the basis that the other one might turn up at some point.

A week later it was a pair of purple boxer shorts. Kenneth is a navy briefs man all the way; he says boxers make him feel insecure. I tucked them away in a pile of my jumpers in case he found them and started asking awkward questions – unlikely, but there’s a first time for everything.

Next, an alien shirt arrived. Not in the pastel colours that my husband favours, but a daring dark blue and red stripe with a contrasting white collar. The kind of shirt he wouldn’t be seen dead wearing. That one I secreted at the back of the airing cupboard – after I’d ironed it, of course – ready for the next trip to the charity shop.

Then the washing machine started turning itself on in the middle of the night. I came down to a kitchen full of warm steam and a pair of damp slim-fit jeans in the drum. I unplugged the machine and turned off the water supply.

It made no difference.

I lay in bed that night listening to the machine waltz its way around the kitchen, bumping into the table on its way to the back door. The crashing and thumping of its escape bid drowned out the sound of Kenneth’s snoring. He slept soundly, oblivious, but in the morning he looked washed out. His hair was losing its colour, and his skin was grey and wrinkled.

For the rest of that week random items continued to turn up, including a teeshirt the colour of cinder toffee, size medium, and the other green-striped sock.

My husband was shrinking. His clothes seemed to fit more loosely, and he was as tense and uptight as a cashmere sweater washed at 90 degrees for an hour.

Yesterday morning, there was a damp spot by his side of the bed and a trail of drips leading along the landing, down the stairs and into the kitchen. Kenneth looked like the pale patch on a duvet cover bleached by the sun, as though all the colour had been leached out of him.

Today when I got up a stranger was making breakfast in the kitchen, dressed in a dark orange teeshirt, slim-fit jeans and stripy green socks. There was a dark cavity under the worktop like a missing tooth.

Wherever the washing machine has gone, Kenneth appears to have gone with it. I don’t think I’ll be replacing them.