Spring sunshine last weekend and my living room, facing due east, is warm and full of light.
Sunshine lifts the heart they say. Not mine.
It’s showing up my many little dilapidations – scuffs and scrapes on the skirting-boards, streaky windows, fingermarks on the door jambs, cobwebs on the cornices and the twinkle dimmed to a dull grey tinge on my inherited bits of Waterford glass.
Oh Lord – time to put on my springtime pinny and embark on an annual task I’m profoundly disinclined to start.
Unlike my mother, who spent her days with a damp cloth in one hand and a duster in the other and would have polished her children if they’d stood still long enough, I am a sporadic cleaner.
My intentions are good but I have no system, cleaning only at need and at random and I can always find a pleasant displacement activity or lame excuse to postpone opening the cleaning products cupboard.
Secretly, I agree with the late and eccentric Quentin Crisp who declared: “After two years the dust doesn’t get any thicker.” Mind you, the thought has occurred to me, should, God forbid, anything happen to me, I’d be found like Miss Havisham, draped in cobwebs with my reputation in tatters.
That, or the prospect of imminent visitors galvanises me into a frenzy of domestic energy and I greet them exhausted, perfumed with Mr Sheen and bleach in an immaculate house – or at least the bits of it they’re likely to see, with the other doors locked on the chaos behind them.
It would help of course, if the house wasn’t so full of stuff that has to be cleaned, cleaned under and cleaned round. It’s the decorative bits and bobs, the pleasing little touches that lend character to a room, that are so time and energy-consuming to remove and clean before you can get at the piece of furniture under them.
I confess I’m not a minimalist – to the despair of the late Loving Spouse who’d take weeks to notice my newest addition to the knick-knackery, before remarking: “I see you’ve bought another dustcatcher.”
I once experimented with taking them all away, but the place looked like a barracks. Auntie Mollie, herself a maximalist magpie devoted to brass, glass and china, sniffily observed, “People will think you have nothin’” - so I put them all back and the house looked like home again.
Some people get great satisfaction out of cleaning. They’re the kind who clear the table immediately after dinner, stack the dishwasher, wipe down the surfaces, whisk up the crumbs with an angled broom and leave the kitchen pristine. By the showhouse perfection of every room, you’d think nobody lived there.
They have parties and vacuum the living room after the last laggard leaves at 3am and spray Vanish on the wine spills. Not for them the morning-after revelation of an indelibly bloodstained battlefield or the discovery a fortnight later of a half-eaten mushroom vol-au-vent under the sofa.
Take it from me, the state of the cupboard under the sink is an infallible guide to the mindset of the woman of the house.
Only in retrospect do I realise that my mother cleaned all day every day, except when she was cooking, washing, ironing and tidying.
The term ‘house proud’ didn’t do her justice. The house was spotless, the glass gleamed, the silver shone; the air was permanently redolent of Parazone and Mansion polish.
I think she’d have been happy to confine us all to living in the coal shed. In fact she said so. What a waste of her considerable talents……
It’s just occurred to me – in the time it’s taken to write this article I could’ve cleaned half the house.
Of course it’s taken as much energy as polishing a ballroom floor by hand, but at least I can sit down doing it. The house-dust will be no thicker by tomorrow and I’m not expecting visitors.
Recently, Daughter Dear bought me a fridge magnet. It says: “You can touch the dust, but please don’t write in it.” Now there’s a perceptive girl who has the true measure of her mother.
