Mum barely raised an eyebrow at my invitation to Gordon Brown’s gaff and so having resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to crack my mum’s obstinate façade of unsurprise, I took her down to Euston by train and across London by taxi to Downing Street. We were scanned and frisked by security and then finally allowed to wander Downing Street at our leisure.
Walking past number 10 I noticed that the front door was open and so Mum and I automatically slowed down in the hope of catching a glimpse of either Tony or Cherie Blair. Neither of them was anywhere in sight but I did get a big smile and a nod from a policeman armed with a machine gun.
Entering the large crowded downstairs drawing room of number 11 in which the reception was being held I switched into star-spotting mode. I whispered the names of a few big-time authors into Mum’s ear but could tell from her expression that she wasn’t much impressed. She was, however, quite interested in what Sarah Brown was wearing and whispered slightly too loudly that she looked like, ‘a lady with a good eye for a nice outfit’. This was high praise indeed and I was considering encouraging her to strike up a conversation with the Chanceller’s wife about what she should wear to her friend’s daughter’s wedding the following month when there was a noticeable change in the mood of the room as though people were excited but desperately trying to hide it.
‘It’s Tony Blair!’ said Mum with genuine surprise in her voice. ‘It’s Tony Blair!’
I was too busy taking in the big grin on Mum’s face even to look around.
‘Didn’t you hear me?’ she said. ‘It’s Tony Blair, he’s in the garden!’
I was tempted to raise an indifferent eyebrow and look in the opposite direction just to let my mum know that I had finally beaten her at her own game, but the truth was I was just as excited as she was. Looking through the large window at the back of the room into what was to all intents and purposes Downing Street’s back garden, I saw a jacketless Tony Blair on the patio of the adjacent building gazing into the mid-distance as though he was taking a moment’s break from a long afternoon of meetings.
Once the event was all over and we were collecting our coats and preparing to make our way outside, I took out my camera and asked Mum if she fancied having her photograph taken in front of one of the most famous front doors in the world.
‘Oh, Michael!’ she said, as though I wasn’t being serious.
‘No really, you should do it.’
I practically had to lift her up and place her bodily in front of the door. My mum, a woman who arrived in this country with only a single suitcase and eleven pounds to her name, was standing outside the front door of the Prime Minister of England. This constituted the best tick on my To-Do List so far and seemed like the perfect end to a perfect week.
Chapter 12: ‘Tidy home so that when people visit you no longer have to wear the shroud of shame.’
There was one item on my To-Do List that I would bet good money would be a universal entry on any To-Do List the world over: ‘Tidy home so that when people visit you no longer have to wear a shroud of shame.’ The only exceptions being those hallowed few who have a cleaner, live with their parents or have too much time on their hands. As I had a small baby, a three-year-old daughter and a wife who insisted on leaving half-drunk cups of tea around the house as though she was a tom cat marking his territory, this latter group was never going to include me.
Like most normal members of society, Claire and I did the once-a-week cursory clean so that Social Services didn’t take our children away, but the kind of cleaning that would merit this week’s tick wasn’t the superficial calming down of chaos conducted in the few hours while the baby was asleep and our first-born was at pre-school. No, this was going to involve the hiring of skips, the moving of furniture, the implementation of Oprah-endorsed organisational systems, the use of industrial-strength cleaning products
and
the wearing of the kind of special suits and breathing apparatus normally reserved for council workmen clearing up the homes of deceased ‘cat ladies’.
With the children out of the house (Maisie was at my mum’s and Lydia was at nursery) and a whole week set aside to earn these cleaning-related ticks, Claire and I decided to focus our attention for the first day of the five-stage process forthwith affectionately referred to as ‘Operation Hose-down’ to general household cleaning. Anything that hadn’t had a good scrub, wipe, polish or scrape in the last year was going to get our fullest attention.
‘Where do we start?’ I said to Claire as we began unloading from the car the best part of fifty pounds’ worth of Sainsbury’s finest cleaning products. ‘Down in the cellar, up in the loft or somewhere in between?’
‘The kitchen,’ said Claire a desperately shameful expression on her face. ‘It’s got to be the kitchen.’
Just as Dorian Gray had the picture in his attic, Claire and I (an outwardly respectable middle-class professional couple) had more than a few dirty secrets of our own most of which, as we pulled our five-burner Smeg cooker away from the wall and peered down at the tiled floor below, were currently staring right at us.
‘What’s that?’ I pointed at a small dark-brown mass on the floor.
Claire swallowed. ‘I think it’s a Swedish meatball.’
‘How long has it been down there?’
‘When was it that we had Helena and Dan over to stay?’
I racked my brains for a few moments. ‘Last February.’
‘Oh,’ said Claire despondently. ‘So that’ll be about a year then.’
‘And what about those?’ I pointed to a group of golden-brown discs.
‘They’re homemade biscuits. I was baking some a few months ago for Lydia’s pre-school and they fell off the tray as I was checking them. Anyway,’ she added indignantly, ‘enough about my misdemeanours, what’s that about?’
I followed her finger to two shrivelled grey lumps.
‘That was me,’ I admit, ‘and I’m pretty sure they used to be chips. They were on a plate. I lost control. I kept telling myself I’d—’
‘And the other thing?’
‘You mean the fork?’
‘No, not that, the other thing.’
‘The salt grinder?’
She shook her head. ‘I mean the other thing.’
‘Oh, that’s an organic pork sausage.’
Claire hung her head in dismay.
‘How long?’
‘When did we get the cooker?’
‘Three years ago.’
‘That will be it then.’
There was a silence.
‘We’re pretty disgusting, aren’t we?’ said Claire, sadly.
‘Yeah.’ I put my arm around her and kissed her on the cheek. ‘That’s why we are made for each other. We appear to disgust each other in equal measure.’
Clearing the space behind the cooker of its rotting remains, kitchen equipment and cutlery wasn’t the last grisly deed for the day. We moved the fridge to reveal lost grapes, a tangerine and an inordinate amount of dust and general debris. Venturing outside I removed the plastic drain cover that’s supposed to keep leaves out but actually does the reverse and attracts them: I shoved my arms inside the stagnant water and fished out half a bucketful of rotting leaves and organic matter decaying slowly in the drain. As Claire remained in the kitchen scrubbing floors, wiping down walls and cooker hoods, I headed up to the bathroom to tackle the U-bend under the sink. For weeks now water had been going down the plughole at a much slower rate than usual and when I dismantled the U-bend I could see why. It was caked in toothpaste and general yuck, some of which flicked up into my open mouth and landed on my tongue, whereupon I’m not ashamed to say that I screamed like a girl, frantically scoured my tongue with a hand towel, rinsed it out about a million times with mouthwash, scoured again with a fresh hand towel and then went and lay down in a darkened room until I felt calmer.
The following day we failed to finish off the remaining cleaning and tidying chores and three days later (we had utterly misjudged how long it was all going to take) we finally finished and were free to tackle the next big job: throwing stuff out and reorganising the stuff that we were going to keep.
In preparation Claire suggested I consult a book that she had borrowed from Alexa but never actually read called
Organising From The Inside Out
by a professional organiser and de-clutter person called Julie Morgenstern who used to be a contributor to
Oprah
magazine (hence Alexa’s endorsement). While it probably would have been a good idea to read the book, it wasn’t on my To-Do List, so I couldn’t do anything other than skim the blurb on the back. According to this there were three basic steps to being organised:
1. Analyse
2. Strategise
3. Attack
This was good stuff. We’d do it!
The analysis element was dealt with by Claire: ‘I hate this house and everything in it.’
The strategy part came later: ‘You start in the basement and I’ll take the bedrooms because I don’t want you buzzing round me while I’m listening to the afternoon play.’
Then we attacked.
My attacking wasn’t what you might call focused. Assigned to the basement I soon grew bored and moved to: the living room where I partially alphabetised my CDs; the car where I cleaned out the boot; the bit at the top of the cellar where I cleared out all the coats and then (having panicked at the thought of Claire finding out how many jobs I had started and failed to finish) I crept upstairs to discover that the space that I had once known and loved as ‘our bedroom’ had become a breeding ground for very large, very full bin bags.
‘What’s all this then?’ I sounded inexplicably like a 1950s’ policeman. ‘Are we having a jumble sale?’
‘I have had enough.’ Claire spoke through gritted teeth. ‘This time, this lot is going for good.’
Claire and I had been in this position before, namely in the Great Bin Bag Wars of 1996 (when we got married); and again in 2000 (when we moved to our present house); and once again in 2003 (when the builders who had been occupying our home while they renovated it for eight months finally left) and it always went the same way. Under the guise of thinning out our wardrobes Claire would attempt to take every single item of clothing we owned (bar the ones we were wearing) to Oxfam. Her bizarre logic was always the same: ‘But you don’t wear any of this stuff!’ And I would always reply: ‘And I won’t be able to if you’re always giving it all away!’ or the more sardonic, ‘Who are you? The Clothes Wearing Enforcement Agency?’ or my favourite: ‘I’m saving them for the right occasion!’ (This always made us laugh because I really would hate any occasion to arise when the only suitable outfit would be a purple lumberjack shirt teamed with an orange waistcoat.) This wouldn’t have been so bad had it just been
my
clothes but I had to worry about hers too. I admit that some of my concern was the pain it caused me that she was giving away a top from Reiss that she had only worn twice even though it had cost over sixty quid; but I also had a sentimental attachment to some of her wardrobe. The checked shirt that she’d worn on our first date, the Bloc Party band T-shirt that I’d bought her two years ago and the Chinese silk pyjamas that she had wanted for so long that I was convinced I would earn enough good husband brownie points to be able to bank the lot and live off the interest. These were all clothes that I had loved and she was intent on binning them!
‘But I don’t wear them,’ she predictably complained.
‘And you never will if you keep giving them away!’ I was equally predictable.
‘Why don’t you change the record! You say that whenever I try to thin out our wardrobes.’
‘That’s because you always misinterpret the words “thin out” to mean throw away everything we’ve ever owned,’ I reasoned. ‘I’ll tell you what, why don’t we just cut out the middleman and whenever we go shopping take the new clothes straight to Oxfam? It’ll save a fortune in bin bags!’
‘Fine, if you’re so brilliant at sorting things out you can do this lot on your own!’ snapped Claire as she threw the roll of bin bags in the direction of my head and stormed out.
Thankfully, as with the Great Bin Bag Wars of 1996, 2000 and 2003, this year’s battle ended with the same face-saving result: a draw. Once Claire and I had made up following our row (which after ten years of marriage we found ludicrously easy) we went through the bin bags item by item and with a sparing use of veto agreed to give to Oxfam the stuff that I genuinely had no interest in. In return I got to keep some of Claire’s clothes that I had various degrees of emotional or fiscal attachment to. After a week of disposing of ancient meatballs, tasting U-bend gunge and arguing with my wife, as To-Do-List ticks went this had definitely been of the ‘hard won’ variety.