I have done it again.
Sometimes I can hardly believe how brainlessly stupid I can be.
We are expecting important visitors tomorrow.
My cousin is coming to visit, whom I like very much but have not seen since my grandmother’s funeral some years ago. He is bringing his wife, whom I have never met at all, his children, likewise, and his mother. The latter, obviously, is my aunt, who is on my list of favourite relatives. They live absolutely miles away, in East Anglia, and are making the most phenomenal effort to come and see us, and I have been excited about it for weeks.
They are going to have a couple of days in the Lake District and would like to choose a poopy. This means that I have got to convince them that the poopies are adorable despite the fact that they have clearly weed all over the living room carpet.
Here, have one of these. They leak dreadfully, but probably you won’t mind that, will you, you can always put your wellies on.
The thing is, it all started off really well. The entire household was obliged to get out of bed early this morning. Nobody was granted an exemption, and today we have cleaned the house from top to bottom.
I admit that there has been an element of forced labour involved.
Oliver has been going round pretending to be a visitor, peering at obscure skirting boards and running his finger along them to see if they are dusty, and then falling about laughing.
The thing is that the visitors were an excuse really. The house has been horribly trashed because it has got an excessive quantity of children, dogs and dust, and it needed cleaning terribly.
The plan was that we all would clean the house and then go for a swim and go to work, except the cleaning took so long it was too late to swim, and then to my horror I have accidentally become drunk.
It was such a relief to get it all done that when Lucy came in from work at eleven tonight we all collapsed round the table with some rather nice Wensleydale cheese, which we had with salty gruyere breadsticks and a new box of Merlot
I am quite sure this is Number Two Daughter’s fault, if she had not been having such a lovely time telling stories and sloshing back wine I am certain that I would never have bothered with the fourth glass.
Thus we have not been to work and in consequence have got no cash. Instead of being a picture of pristine beauty the kitchen is full of empty wineglasses that we couldn’t be bothered to wash, and also I am going to have a hangover now.
I am a failed human being.
I badly wanted to impress my cousin-in-law with my suitability as a relative.
Oliver says that by means of revenge he is going to tell them anyway that the house is usually a filthy pigsty of neglect and disrepute and that the only reason that they can actually manage to wade through the poo on the carpets is because he was dragged away from his wholesome childlike occupations and made to slave unrewarded for hours and hours scrubbing away dirt left behind by alcoholic parents.
How lovely to have children.
Despite all of this it is lovely to have a beautifully fresh clean house again. We bathed the dogs and cleaned the bathroom and opened the windows and pegged the sheets on the line, and polished and washed and scrubbed, and I am happy to say that once again my house is a nice place to live.
Apart from the hangover and the poo on the carpets it is going to be so nice to see them. I have been looking forward to it for absolutely ages.
If only I had more self-control.
