Spring Clean

We have started to hold a late spring clean.

It is obviously not spring, but actually we have not done very much cleaning yet either, so that is all right.

Much as I love the children, they are cluttery sort of things to have about the house, there are discarded shoes and piles of washing all over the place.

I have got to try hard not to get irritated about this, because I know that it only seems awful because most of the time the house stays tidy because they are not here, and since Mark doesn’t play much with Lego or Nerf guns without Oliver I don’t usually have to bother about bricks and bullets getting stuck in the Hoover and lurking un-noticed in dusty corners.

However the summer is the worst of all holidays. During all the other holidays Oliver’s school very kindly stores things like his duvet and towels, and what is more, very thoughtfully washes his PE kit for me and saves it packed in his sports bag for his return.

This is not the case in the summer, when everything owned by both children appears back at Chez Ibbetson in enormous grubby bundles.

We have books and lacrosse sticks, tennis rackets and pyjamas, countless back-issues of The Beano, uniform and rugby boots and tuck boxes with sticky things in the bottom, slippers and teddy bears and wash bags and duvets and towels and smelly swimming costumes and hair grips and lip balm and shin pads.

Of course all children have these things. The thing is that when they are away at boarding school you tend to double up on things so that you don’t have to lug everything they own in and out of school every time they have a two day exeat. So they have Home Slippers (a bit crunchy with dried dog dribble) and School Slippers (robust for middle of the night fire drills) Home Underpants (old, scruffy, probably too small) and School Underpants (name sewn in the back) and so on.

This means that when they come home with colossal amounts of luggage there is nowhere to put anything as their drawers are already full of the comfortably faded and elderly clothes that they wear at home for loafing about during the holidays. There is already a dressing gown on the hook, a pair of wellies in the cupboard and a toothbrush on the sink.

In consequence of this we just hurl everything into the loft as soon as it arrives. This means dragging everything up three flights of stairs but has the happy result that we can shut the door on it and not look at it all.

Of course the next thing that happens is that somebody needs something and goes off into the loft and hurls everything all over the place whilst they rummage frantically for contact lens solution or a lost Lego bit. After two weeks ot this activity the loft looks like a village hall might if the Women’s Institute had somehow had an enormous fight with the choir during a Bring And Buy sale.

The next thing that happens is that I half-heartedly begin to retrieve some of the washing with the vague intention of having pristine piles of laundered towels and crisp fresh sheets all ready and tidily packed in plenty of time so that when the new term draws near I can just throw open the loft door to discover a lavender-scented heaven of smoothly ironed linens, stored and ready for departure.

In fact I have chucked it all in the washing machine, pegged things on the line and dragged them in in a hurry before it rains. Things have been abandoned on radiators or dried on the backs of chairs, and then dumped in a pile on the bottom of the stairs on the always, always ridiculous supposition that anybody walking past will pick things up and take them with them as they go. I always imagine this. It is complete fancy. We don’t.

Then Lucy brought lots of things back from the Ardeche, and Oliver slept in his tent in the garden and didn’t put either tent or sleeping bag away anywhere, and Mark worked at the farm in his overalls and boots, and Oliver and Harry played in the garden with their Nerf guns, and Lucy had coffee in bed, and the dogs rolled in something unpleasant at the farm, and we cooked pizza and nobody washed up, and Mark found a vast stack of handy cold frame building timber in a skip, and Oliver had a shower and forgot what he was supposed to do with the wet towel and pile of used clothes, and Mark trimmed his beard in the bathroom, and today I got up knowing that we needed to Spring Clean.

I’m afraid it is going to take more than one day.