My house is an unholy mess but I have always felt too working class to get a cleaner. The living room is strewn with debris from the kids playing Lego, crayons, paint brushes and random works of what might loosely be called art are scattered on the floor. There are piles of paper that have migrated from my wife’s home office desk onto armchairs and the piano seat, along with old issues of magazines that will never be read. And that’s just the living room — the kitchen and bedrooms tell their own tragic tales.
I suppose I could think about trying to tidy up or getting a cleaner. My wife and I are both working flat out and the children are faster at making a mess than we will ever be at tidying up. Hiring a cleaner would be the obvious solution but there is something about paying for domestic help that just feels wrong. Growing up in a working-class family, my parents tasked their children with much of the housework — I was the domestic help. As a teenager I was expected to do my share of the dishes, the vacuuming and cleaning the bathroom. The idea of paying anyone to do such things was unthinkable — and unaffordable. So instead I take comfort in the fact that even Marie Kondo — the world renowned Japanese decluttering expert — admitted recently that she had ‘kind of given up’ on tidying up since having children. “My home is messy” she told the Washington Post, “but the way I am spending my time is the right way for me at this time at this stage of my life.” I hardly even notice how messy my house is until I visit friends whose homes seem almost gleefully clean and tidy. That is probably because they tidied up ahead of us visiting but it might also be because everyone we know has a cleaner. If we had a cleaner our lives would be improved but I just can’t do it- in the 25 years I have been living in London I have never had a cleaner. When I told Bridget that I was thinking of writing about the subject she was deeply uneasy. She worried that I would inadvertently offend all our friends and everyone reading who do have cleaners. She also wanted to remind me that, in her words ‘the reason we don’t have a cleaner is because you have me.’
