Based on results it still isn't. I have remained single to the point when they whisper behind their hands, ''funny, he never married . . .'' I have nothing against the domestic scene, provided it is other people's. It is a great comfort at Christmas, and pretty boring the other 364 days.

To be properly domesticated you need a wife, furniture and a weird predilection for arguing with the former and moving the latter around the house every six months. To me all furniture does is reduce the size of a flat, and with rents where I live running about $25 a foot, I like to get my money's worth.

Japanese feel the same way. They long ago decided to live on the floor of half a 20-foot shipping container and sell all their furniture to antique shops.

If you are going to be domesticated you will need a profound interest in such adrenalin-rushing pursuits as pushing a shopping cart around the supermarket for five hours on Saturday with your wife, and spending entire evenings together planning a three-day weekend at the Holiday Inn in Phuket.

Being properly domesticated means having dinner at the dining room table and not when you are spread out half-naked on the sofa in front of the TV with your feet on a coffee table stained with beer can rings. Its means clearing out cupboards occasionallyand maybe doing something about the profusion of unwelcome wildlife that inhabits your kitchen.

Take the refrigerator. Domesticated people are likely to keep an up-to-date inventory of what's in their fridge. That is why they bought their $30,000 personal computer: to keep track of the egg-shelf and cans of Coke when they are not devoting whole weekends to working out the size of last quarter's electricity bill and why it is $31.27 more than the second quarter of '89.

Until the tedious rains of last Sunday I had so little idea what was in my fridge I was afraid to look. Boredom got the better of me and I made some interesting discoveries, the first being that employing a full-time, experienced maid has no bearing whatsoever on what goes into your fridge or how long it stays there.

I'm not blaming her. How is she to know that a carton of long-life milk opened in March 1992 tends to lose quality by August the following year. Particularly in the longevity department. The same applies to the jar of mayonnaise I found. The one with the''use by'' date of 10/9/88. And to the olives I brought back from Greece sometime in '91.

At the back of the fridge, propping up the top shelf in one corner, I found a bottle of premier cru. It had been there so long it would be worth a fortune had it not been opened 21/2 years ago and half-emptied.

Then there is the fridge itself. I bought it secondhand in a Hunghom alleyway in 1978. It is bigger than a Tokyo apartment and is held together by rust. Big chunks of it are constantly falling on to the floor and every few days it goes berserk and produces walls of ice so thick it threatens to crush everything inside and then take over the city.

Seven years ago it looked like it would soon expire, so I bought a new one. The new one is stuck in a spare room full of old books while I await the demise of the unpredictable monster that refuses to die.

On to my wardrobe and chests of drawers full of clothes I was loathe to chuck out. Two drawers held only T-shirts, some so old I could not remember seeing them before.

I counted 43. One was emblazoned with a great big red maple leaf and ''Expo '67 Montreal''. These I'd kept through half a dozen home moves because they would one day be useful for things like changing the oil in the car. Except I have not owned a car forfive years and, in the 10 years I did own one, I did not once change the oil or anything else.

If it rained heavily my car got washed. When the petrol indicator dropped past Reserve Tank and on to For Chrissakes Fill Me Up There Are Only Fumes Left! I would look for a petrol station.

And when the boot got so full of sweaty tennis gear that I could not stuff any more in I would decide it was too mouldy to wash and throw it away. That usually happened when I got a flat because the tread had worn down to the strengthening steel bands and I had to get rid of all the shorts and shirts to find the spare tyre.

The other night my girlfriend came around to my place and says she saw small mushroom-like vegetation sprouting from the bedroom ceiling. She swears she had not been smoking anything unusual and is urging me to get the place completely scrubbed down and painted.

Beats me. I never had any complaints about the bedroom ceiling before. Funny I never married . . .

At least, not from women.