Stupidly, I left a pile of money on the fridge while I was in Italy and told the cleaner to come as usual.
I thought it would be nice for her not to lose the business. But my cleaner is not some fly-by-night who takes money for nothing. My cleaner is serious about cleaning. She often leaves me cross little notes complaining about how ‘not dirty’ my house is. Being obsessive compulsive myself, it’s a constant battle to stop her resigning. Usually I dirty the house up for her before she comes. She is rarely satisfied unless there is a trail of destruction throughout, which takes some organising. Unfortunately, I was in a rush before I went away and I didn’t have time to untidy. When I got back from Italy, she had gone berserk.
She had cleaned and cleaned and cleaned on top of the cleaning until she couldn’t find anything else to clean and then she had started cleaning things that were never meant to be cleaned in the first place. My house looked completely alien to me. I kept finding strange-looking objects which had once been functional and were now polished museum pieces, cleaned beyond all use.
For example, the coffee grinder used to have a chrome-coated lid which you pushed down as you ground the beans up. She had scrubbed and scrubbed this until the chrome had come off. I guess this means the chrome was fake chrome, but I would never have known that if she hadn’t scrubbed it off. She had also somehow shrunk the lid then jammed it on permanently so it wouldn’t budge. The coffee grinder looked lovely, but was sadly incapable of grinding coffee.
Almost every other small- to medium-sized gadget in the house had joined The Disappeared.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in