Property: Smut we can do, but just don't get horny

DOCTOR ON THE HOUSE; House infested with unicorns? No problem, says Jeff Howell. Look in the phone book, before Aardvarks

This week's column contains more than its share of smut, but I trust this will not be a problem for the liberal-minded readers of the Independent on Sunday. After all, the building game is fairly heaving with testosterone, and if you've got the builders in at home you'll know what I mean.

Smut hit me in the face, as it were, as I was musing over my proposed unicorn-proofing service. My idea, you may recall, is to spray houses with a colourless liquid, and issue 25-year guarantees against unicorn infestation. It seems to work for the rising damp boys, and apparently that's just as much of a myth.

Anyway, the most important factor in business success is obviously choosing the right name, one that the punters are going to find easily in the Yellow Pages. Anything starting with Unicorn is going to come pretty low down in the alphabetical order; Aardvark is the name that's going to get you first in the list.

Or so I thought until I checked in the phone book. To my surprise, the Aardvarks and the Aarons don't get a look-in until page nine. Because what come before that are letters, as in AA, A&A and AAA, and before that, numbers, starting with zero. So the first entry in the London "Business and Services" phone book is the 00000001A1 Agency which, in response to my call, was unable to offer anything in the plumbing, central heating or electrical line, not without a considerable stretch of the imagination, that is.

In fact, the first 20 or so numbers all seem to be for firms offering what I believe are called personal services. It is not until halfway down the page that you encounter the first plumber, called, with admirable restraint, 1A Action Plumbers. Whoever 1A Action Plumbers are, they deserve our support - they are right in there at the cutting edge, and they are offering a service. I salute them; I will never criticise plumbers in this column again.

I should point out here, for the benefit of readers in the provinces, that the amount of number-crunching you have to go through before you get to the first plumber can vary according to locality. In the Ipswich and District book, for example, the personal services industry does not seem to have got the hang of it - or maybe there is nothing of that sort going on up there. Whatever, 1st Call Pest Control are in pole position in Ipswich, and good luck to them - I shall be contacting them shortly with an offer of a lucrative unicorn-proofing franchise.

Smut item number two concerns that modern den of iniquity, the Internet. Now, I am not in the habit of reading FHM magazine, but an interesting cutting from that worthy journal has been sent to me by a young reader. It is an interview with Bob Guccione, founder of Penthouse. Mr Guccione discovered that "surfers" logging on to the Penthouse name, and expecting to be rewarded with picture of naked women, were instead being directed to the website of a firm of roofers. The extraordinary coda to this incident is that Mr Guccione, instead of unleashing the full forces of the legal profession upon these enterprising scoundrels, actually gave them $10,000 to go away.

I may be missing something here, but I can assure you, if I find anyone messing with my unicorn idea on the World Wide Web, they won't be in line for a spray-off - er, I mean pay-off.

q You can contact Jeff Howell at the "Independent on Sunday" or by e-mail: Jeff@doctoronthehouse. demon.co.uk