Angela Mollard: Stuff the tidying trend — messy life brings me joy

First it was an unhealthy obsession with clean eating, now we have ‘cleanfluencers’ fuelling neurotic fixations with tidying. But where is the joy in soulless organisation? Give me the mess of real life, writes Angela Mollard.

Have you heard of Mrs Hinch? No? Well, you’re about to.

In short, she’s an Instagram cleaning sensation who has amassed two million followers, an international book deal, multiple product endorsements and a fan base which makes Ariana Grande look like she’s barely trying.

While Mrs Hinch — real name Sophie Hinchliffe — has the look of a contestant from The Bachelor or Married At First Sight she is, in fact, a cult figure who lures followers with her cleaning tips.

For instance, she uses diluted fabric conditioner to scour marks off her walls which in turn makes her house smell, well, like Cuddly one presumes.

What else can I tell you? She’s 29, British, married to a salesman and she has names for her

cleaning tools so “Minkeh” is her cleaning cloth, “Vera” a mop, “Stewart” a battery-powered sink scrubber and “Brian” and “Buddy” are something else (care factor nil) presumably gifted at lifting dirt.

Mrs H has also cleverly repurposed her surname into a verb, calling her followers “hinchers” and elevating the rather prosaic task of cleaning the loo into “hinching”. Basically, she’s a Kardashian in rubber gloves.

Uber cleaner Sophie Hinchliffe, aka Mrs Hinch, with her husband and dog Henry. Picture: Instagram

Now I have no trouble with this self-styled Queen of Clean — good for her if she can make a buck out of glamorising grime and slime, and doubtless her book will make a motza when it’s launched here next week. But there’s a quasi-religion growing around tidiness and an increasingly unhealthy expectation of what our homes should be.

Surely, our mothers’ generation didn’t spend half a century fighting for emancipation so that we could worship a woman who admits she can’t sleep at night without “putting the sink to bed” (this apparently involves spraying surfaces, doing the washing up and making sure the cloths are “settled” whatever that means).

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In times of uncertainty we cleave to comforting rituals but this cleaning phenomenon is simply the latest iteration in a disturbing quest for order and perfection. Having wittered for a decade about the “body beautiful” and “clean eating” and “living your best life” we’ve looked around at what else we can sort and straighten and spruce. Ergo we post pictures of our sock drawers and spice cupboards over striding off into nature and embracing the joy of the unkempt.

Interestingly, Mrs Hinch and her predecessor Marie Kondo have both channelled their insecurities into a form of control. Kondo has told how, as a child, she was lonely and awkward and lacked nurturing from her busy parents. “Because I was poor at developing bonds of trust with people, I had an unusually strong attachment to things,” she has said. “It was material things and my house that taught me to appreciate unconditional love first.”

Japanese de-cluttering expert Marie Kondo has garnered a global following of neurotic folders. Picture: AP Photo/Seth Wenig

Likewise, Mrs Hinch has chronicled a history of disordered eating which led to botched gastric band surgery and crippling anxiety. Cleaning, she says, helps her ward off panic attacks.

But flick through her Instagram @mrshinchhome and every image has been filtered to a lifeless grey.

When we make perfection a virtue and throw ourselves on to the hamster wheel of constantly trying to achieve it, we close ourselves off to colour, opportunity and happenstance.

Manic cleaning is about keeping things the same; it’s polishing the known and nervously closing the front door on the unknown.

It’s the inward not the outward; the neurotic over the expansive; the “mine” not the “ours”.

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As the writer Rebecca Solnit says of perfection, “it is not only the enemy of the good; it’s also the enemy of the realistic, the possible and the fun.”

Mrs Hinch’s idealised form of home is not just dispiriting, it’s regressive. Our homes, rightly, are our harbours but it’s the seas outside where real human progress, challenge and nourishment occurs.

Of course, not every woman has to be as groundbreaking as Jacinda Ardern or Malala Yousafzai or Emma Watson.

Neither do they have to trailblaze their way to a Pulitzer or a Nobel prize. But it’s an odd world we live in when visionary status and a lucrative publishing deal is given to someone who champions the merits of a handheld vacuum for cleaning out the cutlery drawer.

In any case I can speak from experience that obsessive cleaning and befriending the Spray N’Wipe doesn’t lead to any sort of nirvana.

Mrs Hinch and a few characters from ‘Narnia’, aka her cleaning cupboard. Picture: Instagram

With my house on the market I’ve been wiping and dusting and cushion plumping with unnatural vigour. I’ve picked up stray frangipani flowers off the lawn and stripped the bathrooms of anything functional and thwarted spiders mid spin. I have cupboards full of drinking classes in neat rows and Turkish towels tossed artfully to suggest a “lifestyle” and delicious orange scent transporting potential buyers to a Grecian citrus grove if only they don’t spot the diffuser.

Sure, the place looks great — ordered and neat and calm. But I prefer it when a roast is spitting in the oven, friends are sprawled over the sofa and kids are pulling unironed T-shirts from the wash basket because their mum is doing something she loves more than folding.

As for Mrs Hinch, she’s expecting a baby. I wish her luck in getting both bub and the sink to bed.

@angelamollard