The duster always rings twice

There comes a moment in every woman’s life when she just has to get on and do what has to be got on and done.

Marriage. Divorce. Getting together. Splitting up. Motherhood. Partnership. Education. Career. Training. Adventure. Exploring. Learning. Romance. Love.

And then there’s housework. A juxtaposition of two of our favourite words combined into the defining attribute of the seventh ring of hell. Heck, throw in some badly tuned not-quite-inaudible lift music along with the dusters and Lucifer himself would be hot-trotting it to somewhere that the sweet little birds fly free.

My good friend Liz once described me as ‘domestically disabled’. In writing. More specifically, in writing on my personal profile on the occasion of my frankly disastrous and short-sighted foray into online dating. I was a little bit hurt. Not about the dating - concerning which I was truthfully neither here nor there – but about the slur on my femininity. That wound gaped deeply for about as long as it took me to, oh, light a cigarette and accidentally drop ash on the carpet.

Liz is, of course, quite correct in her assessment. If I won the lottery tonight and never had to do a day’s paid work again for as long as I lived, there’d still never be quite the right moment to plug in the hoover. Cobwebs would continue to provide safe haven for a bounteous group of spindly spiders who breed and multiply here and there and entirely safe from the fear of assault by feather duster. My one redeeming feature on this sorry domestic score is that I can cook. (Mostly because I like eating. A lot.) But I rarely even bother to do that these days now that my daughter’s away at university, preferring instead to eat crackers and blue cheese, cereals, shop-bought oven-ready, tinned or frozen things, bath buns, sweeties and fruits that need no preparation beyond the peeling of the skin.

But domestically blind though I may be, even I was moved to shame at the appearance of my fridge on its return from the barn this afternoon. Invisible bacteria were crowding round, pushing at the door begging to be let out of the life-sized aluminium-clad Petri dish so that they didn’t catch something. I have been engaged to be married (once so far) more often than I have cleaned my fridge (to be fair on this point I did give the ring back when we split up; I still have the fridge). Quite how remnants of coriander leaves came to be stuck all the way up the back is anybody’s guess. Whatever mysterious force that caused that to happen had also liberally sprinkled onion skins and an indefinable unpleasant trail of sticky brown gloop all over most of the rest of the inside.

There was nothing for it. Hot water, a bottle of something thick and white and ammonia-smelling, a couple of sponges and a tea towel. Much like an episode of M*A*S*H but without Hawkeye or Clinger or any sign of incoming wounded. To my great surprise, the foul goo and the leaves did start to shift, so I rested a moment with a cup of tea and a day dream by way of congratulations. Only to continue my task ten minutes later and find that the white cleansing lotion had frozen to the back of the fridge. Fearless and undaunted, I strode back to the task with renewed vigour, moving at last from cleaning inside to out.

Reader, I burnished him.