OK -So today the missus decides she wants to do a bit of hoovering round the flat. Now I’m not one to stand in the way of a girl’s ambitions, so I dig out the vacuum cleaner and, 'lo and behold' there’s no feckin' bag in it, nor any in the house. And thus begins the latest in a long line of my Trials of Hercules [Updated and adapted for 21st Century living].

I bought the gadget a few years ago from Screwfix and, as it was a industrial type cleaner [Look. If I’m going to have to buy domestic appliances, I’m getting butch, manly ones -alright?!], I thought the best place to find the bags would be their website.

Ha! Ha! Silly me! There was no feckin' trace of either the cleaner, any other products carrying that brand name, or the bags for it!

So I did a search on the web and found not one, not two, but three websites specialising in spares for vacuum cleaners! With baited breath and shivering in anticipation, I visited each site in turn, entering the model name and number of 'My Sucky Friend' and three times got back a -"Your search returned no results"

"OK stobsaí boy…​" -I thought -"Time for a bit of lateral thinking!"

In the bottom of the cupboard I found the polythene wrapper that the original set of bags for the cleaner came in. It had a different brand name on it than that of the vacuum cleaner itself. so I Googled for that. Google unearthed the company’s website. They are in Italy, but have helpfully provided an English translation of their site. From this I am able to find out a great deal about the various vacuum cleaners they make -the length of cable, the attachments supplied, the power consumption, even the fuckin' rotational speed of the motor inside! But do they have anything so crazily obscure as info about where to get the bastard bags for the cunts?…​.</p>

I shall leave the answer to that question up to the imagination of the dear reader!