Women’s lib freed us from domestic drudgery – so what’s with today’s competitive cleaning?

The world is a mess. Pollution and all that eco-jazz. Your body is also a mess, full of toxins that need cleansing. Your skin is ungodly and needs a good hot-cloth treatment and expensive cream. And your house? Well, it’s an absolute tip.

Foxes have eaten my recycling, so rubbish is strewn all over the road. A card was popped through my door offering to steam my carpets, a treatment that seemed more expensive than buying some new carpets. The last man who cleaned my windows disappeared after a complicated divorce and, quite frankly, I can’t be bothered any more.

When I called my daughter a slut the other day – her room was in as bad a way as mine – she was appalled. Slut has sexual connotations, she said, although the word was used in Chaucer about a man. Googling it did not, however, take me to Chaucer, but to some hardcore slut action which I suspect involves more than some dust and a few mouldy coffee cups. I downgraded my ranting to “slovenly”.

I am, of course, completely off-piste and off-trend with all this. Instagram and magazines are flooded with women performing a camp and, to me, totally retro delight in domestic drudgery, swapping tips about gleaming worktops and the use of vinegar for shiny showerheads. This is surely a form of that dread phrase “taking back control” .

It all reminds me of my mother, who was in a perpetual state of hypervigilance about other people’s filth. “Have you seen next door’s nets? They’ve not washed them for months.” Some poor neighbours would be dismissed out of hand; the washing on their line was never as white as my mum’s. No one’s ever was. Mine never has been. I live with the knowledge of my own greyness.

As I grew up, I became more Quentin Crisp-y: the dust doesn’t get any worse after four years, he said, and he was right. My mother had worked as a cleaner, and so have I. This was not the worst job I ever had and I was not the world’s worst cleaner, surprisingly, but you won’t find me on Instagram any time soon pretending you could eat your dinner off my toilet seat.

Many working mothers get cleaners and childcare just to manage – so what is all this domestic bragging about? We live in culturally conservative times, that’s for sure, but is housework still not a bit, you know … boring, and isn’t it a competition that, like so many, women are bound to lose?

In my hall is a pile of stuff I have Marie Kondo-d. I just haven’t got round to actually getting rid of it yet. This failure to create the happiness in my environment that she preaches is a teensy bit annoying; there is unhappiness in my hallway, but then again, I could be stockpiling for Brexapocalypse.

Michele Kirsch has written a fascinating memoir called Clean about ridding herself of an addiction to booze and Valium. After rehab, she got herself the lowliest of cleaning jobs and was fascinated by the stories of other people’s memorabilia, for she is a born storyteller and somehow felt useful clearing up the mess of others after her own life had fallen apart.

This makes sense to me in a way that the cleaning influencers – with their bleached teeth and descaled kettles – don’t. The washing machine did nearly as much for women as the pill, liberating us from domestic chores.

All this endless tidying up is, essentially, a displacement activity. The world is complex, turbulent, uncertain. It’s chaos out there. Embrace it, live with it; you can scrub your tiles and sort out your cutlery tray later, ladies. Leave the house. Tidy up when the party is over. Don’t pretend it is the party. I always knew I was a bloke really, and now I know I am for sure. Where is the bin? Chuck me in it. I am in the way.