I SPENT much of last weekend in bed. A dodgy stomach -- the sort of thing you associate with limp egg sandwiches bought from a garage last thing at night.

However, as I tried to remember every morsel I'd consumed over the previous 24 hours, an item of news caught my attention. Around 60 per cent of all illnesses are picked up through the workplace -- through touching keyboards, telephones, fax machines etc.

So, far from it being down to my husband's tasty curry the night before, writing this column could be to blame for my 24-hour bug. A study by a public hygiene group revealed that after half-an-hour of normal office routine, germs had spread from person-to-person via copy machines, copied papers, computer equipment, telephones, desktops, door knobs, pens and a wealth of other means.

It warns that germs can live on dry surfaces such as keyboards and desks for several days and advises that workers tip up their keyboards to see what debris falls out.

The office is the latest place to be targeted for bad hygiene -- on top of our kitchens, living rooms, bathrooms and bedrooms. I even spotted an article recently about poor car hygiene being bad for our health.

My car -- with its empty crisp bags, drink cans, sweet wrappers and half-eaten pasties -- must be a breeding ground for E.coli. To fight off these deadly invaders, we are bombarded with anti-bacterial cleaning products -- sprays, liquids and wipes.

We are advised to sand-blast vegetables before cooking, de-frost the fridge ten times a week and wash our hands a million times a day. Yet illnesses, particularly those triggered by allergies, are on the increase. It seems to me that we're becoming too squeaky clean for our own good -- so germ-free, in fact, that we're losing our immunities to bacteria. A bit of dirt never did anyone any harm. My children are rarely ill, yet they play for hours on heaps of soil at the park, rolling around in muck. When I'm not looking, they pick up dirty tab ends and sweets from the pavement and stick them in their mouths. And -- what a bad mother I am -- they rarely wash their hands afterwards. As a child myself, I remember doing the same -- scraping bubble gum from the street and popping it into my mouth. I hung around with a girl from a cottage with flag-stone floors that, far from being given a super-going-over with a high-powered Dyson, were cleaned with a stiff brush every morning.

Throughout her life, my grandmother kept food cool in a larder -- which, by today's standards, would be condemned -- and used a spot of household soap to clean her kitchen work surfaces. She had the constitution of an ox and lived to be a ripe old age before her death -- not by natural causes, but in a road accident.

We should be prepared to let a bit more good, old-fashioned grime into our lives.

I'm always trying to curtail my husband's frenetic cleansing activities, as he scurries around with the Dettox spray gun. Not that I believe in letting my fridge become home to more than a dozen cockroaches, I just feel that a little bacteria -- after all, it's a natural thing (look at all those new, bacteria-filled yoghurts that are supposed to strengthen your immune system) -- is good for you. So where did my sudden illness come from? You could grow turnips between the letters on my keyboard, and I did help the kids make mud pies on Saturday morning.

But I'm going to go with my husband's curry. He soaked the meat and veg so thoroughly in top-strength bleach before cooking that I've no form of resistance -- to anything -- left at all.