A spotlessly clean and tidy house? It’s a sign of a wasted life

Housework: this model makes it look fun. It isn’t. Picture: News Regional Media

The kids have been known to call it “mum’s OCD”. I call it tidiness. But do those little buggers have a point? Covid has shifted the parameters of allowable mess, especially during lockdowns, when no one is visiting and silently assessing. “There’s no need to do any housework at all,” the writer Quentin Crisp once proclaimed. “After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.” I haven’t quite sunk to his level of muck but I do get his drift. Because, well, who’s judging, really? During the lockdown it was only the family and frankly they couldn’t care less. This revelation has rocked my world.

It was a rite of girlhood to watch and learn from female elders about the woman’s lot; all those repetitive, exhausting rituals of domestic life. The message: this was your future fate. The mantra: “Keep up don’t catch up.” There was the horror of dust motes spinning in the light and the flotsam and jetsam of late morning dishes in a sink; all those well-worn paths to the tidy house a young girl was led down. Cleaning windows with newspaper. Dusting with damp cloths. Doing dishes with Sunlight soap nestled in its little wire cage. Nuking mould with white vinegar and water; rubbing salt and lemon juice on chopping boards. Lining drawers with old magazine pages, grabbing a cleaning cloth from the ragbag. Waste not want not.

It was a world of Ajax and Gumption, of my mother on her knees scrubbing the bath and the methodical dance with my father when they’d fold the huge sun-brimmed sheets, and move back, aaaaaand together – the only time I ever saw them in perfect harmony. A clean and tidy house was about calm, order, control and the eyes of other women, but mum’s descent into old age was an ascent into letting go. Was that so bad? It felt releasing. It was like she’d cottoned on, finally, to the great womanly con of housework that keeps us straitjacketed, distracted, subservient.

Simone de Beauvoir declared in The Second Sex, “Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time…” Why bother?

For decades I’d considered a rigorously clean house a badge of honour and policed the situation ruthlessly. Exhaustively. It was a hangover from the young adult years as a perfectionist. Nothing must be out of place. Could not sleep, write, or think until everything was where it should be.

But housework is tyranny and a particularly female one. “People very often say to me, ‘How did you do it, how did you raise a baby and write a book?’ And the answer is – I didn’t do housework for four years.” That’s JK Rowling talking. “I am not Superwoman. And um, living in squalor, that was the answer.” Embracing the squalor can be immensely freeing – and productive.

Housework kept me strapped to the mast of exhaustion and stress for too long. From childhood I still remember the “messy house” down the road, and how the housewives of suburbia talked about it despite its kids being part of the Ginger Meggsy brew of the neighbourhood. We used to occasionally cross its threshold with awe and a slight fear. Who were these people; so bohemian, so… other.

For years I was chastened by a messy house and have had to unlearn that. Covid’s loosened everything. Deep in lockdown I realised I was tidying for the guests who may judge who are no longer coming through the doors… so, who cares. This has been the great glittering secret of the pandemic: no one around me clocks the housekeeping. They’ll only notice if I don’t do it completely. But housework lite? Now that’s the way to go. Over these Covid years a lack of discipline has become the new decadence and I’ve seized it. Because the joke was on me.