Well, I finally took the plunge and invested in the ultimate geek vacuum cleaner, a Dyson.

I would have loved to have got The Ball but our house is a narrow terrace with not much unused floor space, so it didn't make sense to get an upright vacuum.

Instead, I got a DC08 Turbine Wrap which compacts down to a small size for storage (just what we needed, since there's only about two cubic feet of unused storage space in this house, and only because I threw out our old vacuum cleaner.)

At $850, the Dyson is not cheap. For someone who has made an artform of the organised mess, it took a lot of frustration with our old crappy Kambrook vacuum cleaner to make me want to spend this much.

But now that I've experienced it I can tell you it's well worth the money. It's like an Apple Mac vs a PC… everything just works, and it works well. It's like one of those vacuum cleaners on TV ads. It was able to lift all the dust and fluff off our Ikea so-synthetic-that-it-attracts-moondust rug in one pass.

The bagless system is pretty ingenious. It spins air round in the plastic cannister (so all the dust / beetles / bits of dried up onion etc) all whiz round and round in front of your eyes. Somehow (the Dyson website explains better than I can on a Sunday morning) the airflow doesn't get impeded even if it fills up with dust. Then you just tip it out when it's full and start again… no more phone calls to vacuum cleaner bag specialists in North Wamingiemungie to track down the BC15C3A-AU-32693 bag.