Sucker

Monday is, as always, the day of clean sheets and cleaning.

This is not the most exciting way to occupy a day, but I persevere conscientiously because of course it is lovely to have a clean, fresh-smelling house. When I die you can write on my grave that I was the sort of person who polished the bath-taps every single day without fail.

Not that I am going to have a grave. I have donated my corpse to the University of Liverpool to hack to bits for the purposes of either research or upsetting medical students, whichever they think is likely to be the most amusing. This has the double bonus of both feeling magnificently virtuous and also saving the children the nuisance of having to organise a funeral. Not that I don’t trust them, but frankly if I managed to make it to the cemetery without Number One Daughter accidentally leaving me on the bus, Lucy forgetting all about it, or all of them getting the day wrong I would be astonished. That is, if I wasn’t dead. Once I am actually dead then of course I will no longer be astonished by anything.

You can’t give somebody else’s corpse to a university, you will be interested to know. You can only give them your own. You have got to do this before you are dead, whilst you are still using it. Once you are dead it is too late, for giving your body to a university and also for lots of other things, so probably it would be sensible to do them all now. Think on that whilst you are eating your cornflakes.

Today I am still using my corpse so I was making it dust the bedrooms and hoover.

I have to plan my cleaning quite carefully these days. This is because last year we purchased a shiny new cordless hoover, called a Shark, although I do not know why, because anything less like the eternal restless predation of these ancient monsters would be hard to imagine.

Still, it is a truly magnificent invention. Thanks to my wonderful cordless hoover, all of my previous hoover-operating frustrations have now disappeared, fled like dreams into the morning sunshine. .

The most obvious and joyful benefit is that no longer do I have the bother of lifting up the cord to hoover underneath it. There is never the snarly, tangly sound as the hoover slurps up its own umbilical cord, wrapping it round and round its slavering brush, needing subsequent careful and painstaking disentangling, sometimes with a screwdriver.

Better still, never again shall I have the frustrating rediscovery that the same cord is not quite long enough to reach the far corner at Mark’s side of the bed. No longer do I have to frown at the dusty out-of-reach corner and wonder if it is truly worth unplugging the hoover and replugging it next to the hairdryer in the awkward corner plug socket underneath the dressing table.

Instead I can sail blithely around the bedrooms, hoovering every distant corner. My carefree hoovering knows no limits.

Of course there is a problem. Do not be lulled into the joyful promise of new technology too quickly.

The hoover will do roughly three minutes before the battery goes flat.

Maybe I am being unfair. It will do my office, the bathroom and our bedroom. After that it collapses, exhausted, and has to recover itself by being gently plugged into the darkened cupboard under the stairs for four hours.

This means that I have to plan my hoovering carefully.

I do the stairs and the living room straight after coffee. Then I rush it back to the safety of its cupboard and plug it in, murmuring words of encouragement as it gasps in the dark, frantically digesting its horrid breakfast of dog hairs and particulate pollution from the fire.

I leave it whilst I go shopping and peg the washing on the line. Then I dust and wash the pots. After a little while I can start on the cleaning, moving the hoover up the stairs to plug it in on the landing by way of allowing it to psyche itself up for the horrors ahead.

I hoover all of our floor. By the time I have hoovered out the dog bed it is coughing and breathing its last.

When the children are at home we have to do their bedrooms on the following day.

The poor hoover cannot manage all of it all at once.

It sucks to be a hoover.