How clean is your house?

I have to say, it gets me down. Heaven knows how I would have coped if I’d been a fifties housewife. I probably would have become a closet alcoholic, or secretly addicted to some kind of over-the-counter medicine, let’s be perfectly honest. I just find it so endless. Ultimately, I feel as though cleaning the house is like fighting a losing battle: all you’ll ever win is a brief respite on one front.

I have a particular kind of cleaning paranoia, and I’m not sure where it stems from. My cleaning paranoia is that there is either a thing that needs cleaning regularly, or some kind of regular cleaning procedure, and for some reasons I am totally unaware of it. Perhaps its so commonly accepted that no one feels the need to talk about it, they just get on with doing it, I don’t know – it’s a paranoia of mine, it’s not supposed to be rational. Anyway, my self-chastising little daydream runs like this: one day, someone will mention this cleaning process to me, and I will realise that in all my years of being responsible for my own living environment, I have never once done this. And I’ll rush home to do it, whereupon I will discover a distressing amount of gunge. Or an infestation of some kind. Or huge big patches of mould. I occasionally scan the cleaning aisles at the supermarket, wondering whether there is a special cleaning product for whatever this process is, in case that will give me a clue.

I was once watching a television programme where a woman was happily slagging off her daughter-in-law’s sluttish habits. She leant in to the camera and whispered, with raised eyebrows, ‘She doesn’t dust her plants." I was instantly stuck to my seat with fear. You’re supposed to dust your plants?! This must be it! Why did no one tell me? Had people been looking at my plants all these years and making assumptions about me? A quick inspection of those few plants that I have managed to keep alive revealed that, yes, they were indeed rather dusty. Thankfully a quick phone conversation to my Mother managed to get me back into a more rational mental place where I could agree with her that life was, in fact, too short.

Part of my problem is that I take it all so personally. I am prone to find metaphors at the best of times … but perhaps particularly when it comes to the state of the bathmat. And don’t even get me started on the showercurtain. Quite how you’re supposed to organise your life so that you don’t have your grouting, bathmat and shower curtain all stained with mildew is beyond me. It probably involves early starts, or perhaps just buying new ones all the time. Jack tells me that just because the bathroom needs a clean doesn’t mean we are bad people, but on the day when I found a slug in the bath, it was hard to remember these kinds of reassuring words. It was all a little bit of a blur. In fact, it was a Great Big Blur: I was in the shower so had no glasses on. I looked down and innocently thought, ‘What’s that funny smudge on the bath?’ Being so hilariously myopic, I had to bring my nose right up to it before I could see that it was a huge big fat slug.

I burst out of the bathroom, shrieking, "Slug! Slug! There’s a slug in the bathroom! We live in filth!" Or words to that effect. My reaction was very similar when I realised we had mice in our old flat. They had been hanging around in the kitchen cupboard, having some kind of loose-bowelled party in a bag of porridge oats. It made me think terrible things about myself, with no real reason. Obviously, rationally I know that there is not necessarily any correlation between having a bit of limescale on your taps, and finding a slug on your showercurtain … but I still couldn’t quite shake off the idea that the little bugger had done a tour of all the bathrooms in the neighbourhood, rejected most on the grounds that they were too hygienic and sparkling, and settled on mine as a way of publicly marking me as unclean.

For me, cleaning is like eating. It may be temporarily satisfying to see the carpet looking clear, or the sides free from dust. But give it an hour or two and you’re right back where you started. Jack’s mother gave him the book ‘How clean is your house’ for Christmas, and I began to read it rather compulsively, basically using it as a tool with which to flagellate myself, (‘it says here you should clean the kitchen floor once a day!’). I have to say, I was almost having fun, beating myself up mentally, wailing to Jack about how dirty the house was, until I reached the page where Aggie says that part of her essential cleaning utensils include cocktail sticks. She elaborates, helpfully, ‘Useful for getting the dirt out of screw heads if you’re as obsessive as me.’

I mean, really. Even I, with the most determinedly self-critical nature in the world, couldn’t continue after that point. Which leaves me here, on a Sunday, happily distracting myself from dusting by writing in Open diary. So much more rewarding, I think.

With love,
therumtumtugger
xxxx