1 - For illicit sex

Many years ago I took a new girl friend home to my bachelor flat for the first time. As I put my key into the door, she said: 'Do you mind if we go somewhere else? I just couldn't - not here.' She then revealed that she had slept in my bed regularly for a year with a married colleague of mine who used to borrow my flat.

That was the day I stopped lending out a love nest to my friends. If my flat was going to hold memories for pretty girls, I reasoned, I ought to be included in those memories. This is now my excuse for keeping adulterous male friends out of my bedroom.

'I like your wife/husband too much' is another perfectly reasonable objection to not wanting to change your sheets when you come home from work. Even if you don't know the partner who is being cheated on, the point is you might meet them socially at some time and become friends. When the affair is discovered and the recriminations are flying, it's going to be all your fault for providing the opportunity and the Dunlopillo mattress. You'll be the one who wrecked the marriage.

But desperate, sex-starved lovers can be very persuasive and, by refusing a request on these grounds, you may find yourself backing down in the end on humanitarian grounds.

In these circumstances, there is only one way of putting an end to the debate once and for all. A married person is already occupying your bed when you're not. Somebody you both know very well but whose identity you could not possibly reveal because it would mean breaking a confidence. They have bagged your bed first and, judging by the debris they leave behind, the affair looks like continuing indefinitely.

2 - To friends and freeloaders

Many of us, fond as we are of our friends, don't like the idea of them burning a hole in our sitting-room carpet, unearthing, while searching for a duster, the love letters we wrote twenty years ago, or breaking an irreplaceable ornament of great sentimental value. It's unreasonable of us, I know, but unreasonable is what we are.

But if burning holes in sitting-room carpets puts a strain on friendships, so does declining to lend friends your home when you're away. After all, they argue, you're not using the place. What kind of people do you imagine they are?

The answer must be that they are the kind of people to whom you would love to lend your home if it weren't impossible, for one of the following reasons: While you are away . . .

The place is being redecorated/rewired.

The rodent officer is laying poisoned bait in every room in an attempt to solve once and for all your vermin problem. It is essential that no human activity should disturb the roaming mice or rats.

Arrangements have already been made for the telephone and electricity to be disconnected during your absence. This is a precaution you always take and at this stage it cannot be reversed.

Your landlords are enforcing to the letter a clause of your lease that prohibits anyone except your next of kin from occupying the flat in your absence. The landlords are just looking for a chance to throw you out, following your success in having the rent halved by the Rent Officer last year.

All the beds, mattresses, and curtains have been removed by an industrial upholstery and dry-cleaning contractor to be resprung or cleaned.

Your 'silent partner' in the flat or house will be staying for a day or two with a lady friend. He's a globe-trotting businessman who pays a substantial percentage of your overheads in return for a pied-a-terre during the few days a year he is in town. This is such a perfect arrangement, you would hate to do anything to upset it.

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