Lockdown Week 2: How clean is my valley…
Two weeks in and the nation’s middle classes had to eyeball the full horror of not having a cleaner any more. Whilst the sight of Joan Collins and Victoria Beckham in marigolds on Instagram was clearly their contribution to keeping the nation’s spirits high, the reality was slightly less glamorous for the rest of us.
Cleaning cupboards were raided, Lakeland brochures devoured and white vinegar stocks depleted. The internet was awash with new ideas for cleaning things with bicarbonate of soda which only added to the current panic buying of all things baking related (can anyone get hold of plain flour these days?).
In some ways this was a great national leveller — a small example on the landscape of how this pandemic is both bringing people together and taking away a great deal that we had taken for granted. For a lot of women (and some men), the cleaner coming is a necessary luxury that buys them time. When faced between the direct trade off of cleaning the house or throwing money at the problem, for many getting someone else to do it is the obvious choice. It does often liberate the burden on a lot of working women who still do the vast majority of these domestic tasks on top of their paid employment.
It also provides employment to a lot of women who are not able to move into white collar jobs. And therein lies the rub. Whilst not having the cleaner coming during this pandemic is a great leveller, it is only a leveller of those wealthy enough to be able to employ one, be that a global celebrity or working (wo)man with a reasonable salary. It is not a leveller of the class underneath who are the ones providing this invaluable service. Not for them the novelty of donning the yellow gloves and rootling around to find the bleach at the back of the cupboard. They have always cleaned their own houses as well as all of ours but now their income stream is cut off and what is left for them? In many cases they are paid cash and therefore are not registered with HMRC and cannot be furloughed. It’s a sobering thought.
In my own domestic sphere, my cleaning frenzy continued unabbated by the lockdown. In fact the lockdown has brought out a whole new interest in minute levels of detail. This week I cleaned the bannisters. Every single one.
God knows how things had got on them. Where do these random drips on the paintwork come from? Drips of tea? Airborne liquids? The mind boggles but probably best left unexplored as it begins to get too horrible to contemplate…
I followed this up with buffing the glass on any internal doors, cleaning the wooden shutters, dusting things that clearly had not been acquainted with Pledge for some considerable time and teaching the kids how to clean the sinks.
This last one had been a great success at the start. Alas, pride comes before a fall — I had literally just said (in a self-congratulatory way) to my husband that it was really great the children had taken this on and it was probably right to get the kids involved in the team effort to keep on top of the housework, when a squawk from above indicated that all perhaps was not going swimmingly.
Needless to say the terrible twosome had got carried away and decided that surely the key way to celebrate a successful sink cleaning activity was a victory roll across our bed whilst holding sopping wet cleaning cloths that dripped a combination of water and anti-bacterial spray. The stream of residue had been run over the carpet, onto the bed, through the bedsheets and into the mattress and then (for good measure) back along the walls on the other side of the room.
I am counting the days until our beloved cleaner, Bev, is back with us.
