Day of the Duster

Busy sort of day. Not only Mark but also the children are due to come home this weekend: so I was obliged to go and survey the state of their bedrooms and do some restorative clearing up.

I have fallen into the slovenly habit of closing the bedroom doors behind them as they hurtle off to the car to go back to school, trailing books and prep and tuck down the stairs in their wake. Then I just ignore the whole revolting lot for three lazy child-free weeks until I become guiltily aware that return is imminent. This is easy to do because their bedrooms and bathrooms are on a floor by themselves, so I can completely avoid going anywhere near them at all if I like. We have got a tall thin terraced sort of house on four floors which somebody once thoughtfully converted into a B & B so there are bathrooms and bedrooms all over the place, the children have a bathroom each which is wonderful because it means nobody has ever used up all my loo roll and not replaced it (Mark knows better) and my nice Bluebell soap never gets used and left in a sad viscous puddle by some indifferent juvenile heathen. Not that they would bother, Oliver doesn’t seem to use soap at all, and Lucy thinks my chosen fragrances are fit only for decrepit old ladies. There is an unexpected bedroom right next to the front door, which is where we sleep. I like this a lot, because it looks straight out over the street and I can be unashamedly nosy from the privacy of my own bed in the mornings through a strategic gap in the curtains with a cup of steaming coffee and the Today Programme on the radio.

So it has been the Day Of The Duster. I have stripped beds and retrieved horrible smelly damp towels and scrubbed away puddles that were once sticky but had set into a sort of shiny blob: and collected three-week-old plates and mugs of fermenting apple juice and emptied rotting banana skins out of bins and hunted under beds for long-ago-discarded underwear and socks, and been utterly ashamed of myself: if it was somebody else’s house I would never have come here for dinner.

A smell of bleach and beeswax polish is now wafting down the stairs: lovely white cotton duvet covers have been washed hard and dried over the fire and put back on the beds, smelling faintly of lavender soap and woodsmoke. There is a neat stack of logs, and a cheerful fire in a shiny grate. I have swept and polished and hoovered and scrubbed and filled the house with jugs of daffodils and lilies. It is tidy and trim and sparkling clean, and I am feeling so proud of it all.

Next time I’ll do it straight away.

LATER NOTE: Mark has arrived home. He threw his jacket on the sofa, dumped a sack of washing on the floor and emptied litter from his en route snacks on the table, then beamed at me as though I might be delighted to see him.

Hmmm.