Did you know that the follow-up question to "is there anybody there?", much loved amid mystic circles, is actually "wearing anything nice?" I didn't either, but it is. Dead people wear clothes and only right too. It was one thing for the young boy in The Sixth Sense to see dead people, but if he'd also been exposed to his aunt Gertrude ? naked as the day they found her body in the coal shed ? well, even Bruce Willis would have blushed.

It was a psychic that told me. Now psychics, cleverly, maintain that in reading terms I am dead to them. "You are dead to me," they say, eyeing me suspiciously. "I feel no energy from you, nothing," they add. My wife says the same, but they also hint that my deceased kin on the other side are in no rush to contact me anyway. Even she doesn't do that.

This psychic, like the Sixth Sense boy, also saw dead people when he was a child. "Were you not terrified?" I asked him. "No," he told me, "you see, for a long time I didn't realise they were dead. They were so normal to me."

I wondered aloud, "had they clothes on?" He seemed surprised, "of course, of course they had clothes on."

He thought I was wondering if the ladies might be in the naughty naked nude. But I wasn't, really. It's just, you would have thought, when the mystery of death is at last revealed and the veil between this world and the next is lifted, you wouldn't have to worry anymore about being caught wearing the jumper your mother gave you.

Be just our luck, wouldn't it? To be badly dressed for eternity.

He was losing me now. I was thinking random thoughts ? If we have clothes do we have to have presses? Who irons? Do colours still fade? ? when I suddenly heard him telling me that he is often asked to help in missing-person cases.

Then the words 'car key' appeared mysteriously in my mind. I hadn't seen my car key in two days. Operative word here is 'key', not 'keys'. I lost the spare ages ago. The garage had told me I could only order a new one if I had the log book. The log book was locked in the car. I started screaming the words "where are my keys?" in my mind and asked him if there was anything he wanted to tell me.

His answer was so vague that even now I struggle to remember a single word of it.

It was like a James Blunt B-side. Initially it seemed to be going nowhere but then suddenly it petered out. It was like a ghost itself. He may have answered my question but I just can't be sure. I might have imagined he answered it, or dreamt it.

In the absence of the car key I asked him if my producer should get engaged. He became very serious: There was a very dramatic pause for effect. "No," he said, "no, I'm sorry, tell her no."

She isn't dating or even planning to.

We found my keys under a curtain, bedroom variety as opposed to netherworld.

They'd just been on the dark side for a bit.