I kicked off my day by staying in bed, crumbling croissants, sipping coffee and absorbing the first few chapters of Patrick O’Brian’s brilliant Post Captain. I’d just got to the bit when Captain Aubrey decides to throw a ball for the local gentry when some fool started honking on the front door buzzer.

It was the postman delivering, as he sometimes does, a parcel.

“It’s a parcel for you,” said my wife, who’d answered the door.

“Ah yes,” said I, remembering what it would be. “It’s a CD of strip tease music. Glamourpuss said she’d send it in return for those French albums I sent her earlier in the week.”

So I opened the package and, inside, was a brand new copy of Take it Off! Strip Tease Classics. There aren’t many better ways to start the morning than to be given a CD adorned with a girl in a pretty blue dress; especially when that dress is a hologram that vanishes to reveal a rather dashing set of foundation garments.

“Oh look,” I said after unfolding the bits of paper that were also inside the jiffy bag. “Puss has sent a striptease routine as well.”

I handed my wife a sheet of A4 entitled filled with lots of instructions about snapping legs open, circling upper bodies and that sort of thing.

I was immediately reminded of my efforts to cook things out of Nigel Slater’s books, and could imagine the performance: “Oh, hang on. No, that’s not right. Oh, of course snap legs shut. Ok, did that seem right? Right, now it says ‘Slide something down each leg’. What does that ’something’ say? I’ve spilt egg on it.”

I didn’t get far with this train of thought, though, as it was broken by the sound of giggling next to me.

“What’s so funny?”

And sadly, that’s where I’ll have to bring the tale to a close, because to tell it would give Glamourpuss’s game away. You’ll just have to console yourself with the notion that good tales are also more tease than they are strip.

Neither do good striptease routines often involve cardigans.