THE SEVEN PLAGUES OF IAN

Let me introduce you to Ian. Ian is an English teacher who has been working down in the sunny Russian resort town of Sochi, on the Black Sea. He is English, like myself, mild mannered and bespectacled, like Clark Kent, and is an old friend of my flatmate's. In fact, Ian is staying with us at the moment. Oh, one other thing - Ian is the unluckiest man in the world.

Ian had to leave Sochi under a cloud. His boss refused to let him take all the holiday time that he was owed; Ian went ahead and took it anyway; he was sacked, without being payed his previous six weeks' wages. The school he worked at also tried to confiscate his passport in order to cancel his visa, and held his property under lock and key until he handed over his documents. Eventually, with the intervention of the police, Ian recovered his stuff (though not the money he was owed). And after a couple of months teaching privately in Sochi, not receiving a regular salary, he decided to come to Moscow and try his luck. Never a good idea as far as Ian is concerned.

So Ian arrived at our flat on Thursday evening, feeling a little under the weather. He woke up the following day with full-blown flu, and spent the next 48 hours sleeping on my broken sofa rather than looking for employment as planned. On Sunday, feeling a little better, he decided to get up and take a shower. In the shower, he managed to - somehow - knock several shower tiles off the wall which smashed in the bathtub and cut one of his feet wide open. He spent the next twenty minutes bleeding over the kitchen floor.

Once he had stopped bleeding, he came out with me and my flatmate Gareth to meet a Russian friend of ours, Marina, who had invited us to visit her home town for a couple of days. While we were sitting on a bench in the metro station, waiting for Marina, Ian's nose started to bleed. It continued to trickle blood for the next hour and a half - when we met Marina, when we bought train tickets, when we got onto the train, when the train left. Ian spent most of that day with a ball of tissue held to his face.

Since then, Ian's bad luck has been less dramatic but it has continued. This morning, for example, I asked Ian to venture out into the communal corridor of our block of flats to throw our rubbish down the rubbish chute; when he came back, thirty seconds later, he was unable to shut or lock the door. Somehow, merely through his touch, the door had warped and now no longer fitted the frame.

My flatmate has a theory that Ian's bad luck has been replicating, in random order, the plagues visited upon Egypt in the Old Testament. We've had the rivers of blood, for example! In fact, Gareth even blames his piles on Ian's coming.

Either that or Ian's boss in Sochi is in league with the devil, and has placed a curse him which will haunt him for the rest of his days.

Ian still has twenty four hours with us - what more damage can he do? Watch this space.