The other night, I spent half an hour cleaning the mud kitchen of a city farm, surrounded by sand, goat hair and mulch. I have never cleaned the inside of my own oven. Yesterday, I lost a happy hour dusting all the shelves of my friend’s bookshop with a fluffy grey duster so extendable that at one point I started cleaning the rafters just because I could. I have never, to my knowledge, dusted any of my shelves. Last week, I happily washed about 40 wine glasses after a book event, noting the different shades of lipstick as I went. Washing up in my kitchen makes me want to punch a hole through the sink.
Cleaning anything that isn’t my own home feels less boring, less pointless, less like my soul is being leached into an abyss of dirty hobs and splattered toothpaste. Perhaps it’s because this kind of cleaning less pointedly marks out the continued gender inequality that lurks at the heart of most British households and was exacerbated by the pandemic. A report called How Are Mothers and Fathers Balancing Work and Family under Lockdown?, published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London in May 2020, found that, in the first months of the first UK lockdown, mothers were still doing disproportionately more housework and childcare than fathers. Even when both were in the house. Even if both were paid employees. Even if the mother was the primary earner.
