Each Saturday morning as I lug our Henry Hoover up two flights of stairs with bad grace I have to remind myself: why don’t I have a cleaner again? Friends are astounded; for the time-poor middle class these days it’s like saying one doesn’t have a flushing toilet. Yet for four years, despite working full-time, me and my husband have done all the housework, often with hangovers, never with pleasure.
Why? We can afford a cleaner. It’s not due to liberal guilt. I’ve had lots in the past: one brilliant, some fine, a couple atrocious (shaking the bath mat was “doing the bathroom”). Well, I can’t be bothered any more. I’ve decided that, marginally, having a cleaner is more of a hassle than not. Yes, I realise how FWP (First World Problems) that sounds. I never loved having someone scrub my U-bend but the real reason is that it occupied too much headspace. With a good cleaner I’d be so grateful that I’d fretfully do most of it before they arrived in case they thought me a slob and dreaded their visits like homework. With a poor one I’d waste mental energy feeling resentful and dreaded their visits like a bad date. Plus I’ve twice worked as an undercover cleaner for The Times. If you think your hired help doesn’t judge you for saving up those splattered plates, you’re wrong. I often muttered “idle pigs” as I gathered strewn dirty knickers. Once I worked through a tower of week-old roasting pans left from a dinner party as madam sat with her feet up, drinking. So for me, on balance, it’s less of a mindscrew to do it myself. Even if for three hours a week I mop my floors with a face like curdled fat.
Perfect priests
What makes the perfect sitcom? If the test is that its humour never stales then Father Ted passes with flying colours. Frank Kelly, who played Father Jack, died on Sunday exactly 18 years after its star Dermot Morgan (Father Ted Crilly) suffered a fatal heart attack. Yet watch any of the 25 episodes from the 1990s and they’re box fresh, like Fawlty Towers. My daughter, born six years after Morgan died, watches Father Ted DVDs as often as Modern Family. Last summer we took her to County Clare for the Father Ted tour, a splendidly slapstick affair in which you have tea in the parochial house and pose with placards reading “Down with this sort of thing”. Younger tourists were infants in the Nineties yet were word-perfect on the scripts. Like me, they bought souvenir candles made from “Father Jack’s earwax”. We won’t see its like again; I should light one in his memory.
Card sharps
Advertisement
Seeking a Mother’s Day card in Clintons I eyed the 60ft long wall offering thousands of choices and felt so tired I left. “Grow or die” is the mantra and businesses sure know how to milk a teat. There were Mother’s Day cards from the dog and cat, from husband to wife (why?), from sister to sister, from mother to daughter (eh?). Elsewhere I’ve seen cards from “The Bump”: tap that foetal pound! The latest trend is for the inappropriate. You can now buy cards for your “MILF” (Mother I’d like to f***). Surely even Norman Bates would balk at that. Still, a card apologising for the, er, damage your child’s head did during labour might be fractionally less cringey than some of the vomitously mushy poems.
Canned laughter
Tinned soup divides our household. My husband has a tin a day whereas you couldn’t pay me to eat something that tastes of metal and smells like flatulence. This week I triumphantly waved under his nose reports that Baxters tomato soup contains more salt than a Big Mac. He shrugged, which is unsurprising given that he also eats tinned peas even when there’s Birds Eye in the freezer. Harold Wilson once said he’d choose tinned salmon over smoked because it tasted better. But the only way I’d willingly eat a tinned potato is if I was a) starving or b) in a nuclear bunker.