We don't like heights, so that would rule out mountain climbing right from the start. And we can think of far more sedate ways to spend our spare time than working our way up a cliff face.

So we can safely say we'll never join an expedition attempting to scale the south face of the Matterhorn. Or the north face for that matter.

However, we're currently have a problem with mountains at Struggle Street. We have a mountain of clothes needing to be ironed. And it's getting bigger by the week - why, we venture that even Sir Edmund Hillary in his prime would have second thoughts about trying to make it to the summit.

We're fast running out of room at Struggle Street, what with all this freshly washed clothing lying around the place. So it's time to be pro active. The way we see it we can take four courses of action - ignore the problem; pass it on to a kindly relation; pay someone to do the job or tackle the task on our own.

To the surprise of many (including this writer), we're taking option four. We're going to take up ironing.

We had a brief flirtation with ironing a few years back. To be honest we didn't mind it too much, despite all the bad press ironing seems to attract. We were getting pretty handy at the task as well.

That all ended one Sunday afternoon.

We had a stack of ironing to get through and we realised this was going to cut heavily into our hotel recreation time. So for the greater good we decided to hire an ironing person.

We haven't lifted an iron in anger since. However, circumstances have changed. So it's back to the ironing board for this correspondent.

However, we do admit to being a bit rusty.

Another minor hiccup is that we no longer own an iron, having sold our previous one during a time of economic hardship.

So we need to buy an iron and then enrol in a refresher ironing course.

Here's the problem. We've looked at the myriad of courses available at Taree TAFE and there's not one mention of ironing. There's access to work and training, hairdressing, farm fencing and even chain sawing. But nothing to do with ironing.

This is an outrage. Australia is apparently a nation chock full of unqualified ironing people. The TAFE system needs an immediate revision.

Perhaps this is the next task for Peter V'Landys. If he can get the NRL back, surely he can organise to get an ironing course up and going at TAFE.

But in the meantime our clothes mountain grows by the hour.

We were going to say this problem needs to be ironed out immediately.

But we'll spare you that one.