I went to a gig a few months ago, and being acquainted with the performer, I went backstage after the show, where his manager gave me some tour merchandise: a tea towel. Yes, a tea towel, as in “You wash, I’ll dry.” This being a Billy Bragg show and not a Goth rock concert, I was hardly expecting a line of coke and fifth of Jack Daniel’s, but the tea towel, I felt, was a great signifier of domesticity being the new rock’n’roll. On the way home with my fellow ageing rock chick gig-goer, we discussed not the merits of the gig, but the benefits of ironing the tea towels before you use them, to increase their absorbency.

I can’t work out the precise point at which it became officially OK to discuss ironing without irony, to admit that you’ve a fascination for all things to do with housework instead of a healthy feminist scorn. For me I think it was when (American domestic goddess) Martha Stewart went to jail because it proved you could be business-smart (though not smart enough to avoid prison), but still rhapsodise about floor wax. Multitasking or what?

Part of the draw of housework is that it is a fantastic counterpoint to thinking work. One friend who works from home says: “If I am stuck on a work problem, I take out the ironing and watch old episodes of Dallason cable. I think I am pretending I am my mother, and it is comforting.” One woman’s comfort may be another’s way of reclaiming control over CHAOS. This is an acronym which stands for Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome, a phrase that pops up on the popular American domestic cult website Fly-lady.net, an online primer on clearing your clutter and cleaning your crud.

Flylady is Marla Cilley, a North Carolinian who set up her website in 2001 with a mission to help women to get on top of their housework, get organised, and get happy. Flylady has more than 400,000 members in 65 countries. Once you join (it’s free) she sends a barrage of e-mails to keep you on your toes, and you can look in the online shop for feather dusters, which are unlike other feather dusters because they make dusting FUN, or so say the hundreds of fly people who write in to say how fabulous the dusters are. And I must believe them, because now I want one, too.

I do like Flylady’s domestic tips, but have to wonder where constructive advice ends and where the obsessive begins. Flylady (so called because she likes fly fishing, not rap music) says there is always time to shine your kitchen sink. Your world can be falling apart, but shine that sink, because Flylady says you must: “I want you to have a sense of accomplishment. When you get up the next morning, your sink will greet you and a smile will come across your lovely face.” Do I want my sink to smile at me? Or for that matter, my freshly “swished and swiped” toilet bowl, for as Flylady writes, “Nothing says I LOVE YOU like a clean toilet to throw up in when you are sick!”

The problem is that this weirdness detracts from some otherwise good, even great, sensible, and time-saving tips. Because of Flylady, I do my chores with a timer, which is practical because you don’t get bogged down: when it pings, you’re finished, even if you’re not. But also there is great psychology behind it. Anything is bearable if you have to do it only for ten minutes.

Flylady divides the home into zones, which you clean and tidy once a week, and hotspots – areas that attract clutter, and she wants us to “stop the Hot Spot from becoming a raging Clutter inferno”. Think of it: clutter as an all-consuming Hell.

One way of tackling clutter is the 27 Fling Boogie. Take a rubbish bag, go through your house and fling out 27 things. Take them straight out to the bin. Then, take a box and collect 27 things to give away. Fling! Boogie! She makes throwing stuff out sound like having an affair, or going dancing. Which detracts from the erroneous maths, because the 27 Fling Boogie leaves you with 54 fewer things. That’s pretty much everything I own. But it is rather liberating.

There is no doubt that a clean, tidy house is nicer than a dirty, cluttered one, but I am of the 1970s generation who had housework drummed out of my psyche. Our mothers told us that a clean kitchen was a sign of wasted life, and so I can’t help but view very tidy houses with suspicion.

Have you ever entered an exquisitely clean and tidy house, one of those John Paw-sonesque minimalist jobs with gleaming surfaces devoid of any stuff, and your hostess, spying a stray magazine on the sofa, throws up her hands and says, “I know it’s a tip.” Your analytical mind takes in the show home perfectionism, and you wonder if a) she genuinely thinks it’s a tip, in which case she is in the throes of an obsessive compulsive disorder, or b) she is pretending that she thinks it is a tip, on the off chance that your house is even tidier, and this would be tip-like by your exacting standards or c) you have entered the wrong house, as you don’t actually have any friends who live like this.

Now that we are in the grip of a housework revival, you may well have friends like this coming out of their tidy closets. You can say you’re house-proud, as long as you look slightly ashamed. Because in the postfeminist world, it’s still not cool to admit that you can’t leave the room until all the scatter cushions are lined up in the same direction.

Kim and Aggie and Anthea, those Haus-frau dominatrices, encourage pigsty voyeurism by inviting us into people’s messy homes on the telly so we can feel superior (depending on where you think ultra-cleanliness ends and neurosis begins) to either the Marigold and vinegar-wielding cleaning coaches – because we liberated types have better things to do than attack the skirting boards with an old toothbrush – or to the sluts and lazy lumps who let half-full cartons of takeaway curry rot gently under the sofa.

Not only is it more televisual to polarise the debate into pathological slobs v the freakishly tidy, but it also reflects how we can think of housework only in terms of what disorder the housekeeper is brewing: too tidy, and she is repressed, highly strung and too slovenly, and it is a reflection of her disorganised, and perhaps depressed (ie, why bother?) mentality.

Heaven forbid that any of us take a moderate approach to cleaning. That is too boring. And with boring comes another kind of shame. Take my screen visits to Flylady: when I am reading her tips on the website and my husband or kids come into the room, I immediately switch screens as if I had been looking at porn, because I don’t want them to know that I have sunk to this sink-shining low. Reading about housework is my dirty little secret. It sure beats actually doing any.

THE ULTIMATE FEMALE JOKE

A woman was sitting at a bar enjoying an after-work cocktail with her girlfriends when an exceptionally tall, handsome, extremely sexy middle-aged man entered. He was so striking that the woman could not take her eyes off him. The young-at-heart man noticed her overly attentive stare and walked directly toward her. (As all men will.)

Before she could offer her apologies for staring so rudely, he leaned over and whispered to her: “I’ll do anything, absolutely anything, that you want me to do, no matter how kinky, for £20, on one condition.” Flabbergasted, the woman asked what the condition was. The man replied: “You have to tell me what you want me to do in just three words.”

The woman considered his proposition for a moment, and then slowly removed a £20 note from her purse, which she pressed into the man’s hand along with her address. She looked deeply into his eyes, and slowly and meaningfully said . . . "clean my house."

TIDINESS MAKES ME FEEL GOOD

Fran Cutler, runs the party organising agency 2Active. Her clients include Kate Moss and Sadie Frost

I am a little bit of a tidy freak. I clean all the time. I have this amazing gadget called a Dyson Dustbuster and I use it everywhere. I am quite obsessive about it. Whenever there’s dust in the house I’m there with my Dustbuster, making a lot of noise, getting on everyone’s nerves. I have a cleaner who does the beds and things like that, but I always make my own bed before work in the morning. I never leave it unmade – I think it’s a sign of someone quite slovenly. I love putting everything back in its place. I lead a stressful life so when I come home everything has to be tidy. Tidiness makes you feel good because it is something in your life that is neat when everything going on around you is chaotic.

TAKING A SHINE TO MY AGA

Marie-Louise Clayton, Finance director, Venture Production, an oil and gas company in Aberdeen

Starting a job and finishing it yourself is something that you rarely get to do in the workplace, especially in my job, so cleaning and tidying can be really satisfying. I hate vacuuming – I’d rather have a dirty house than vacuum – but I do like cleaning my Aga. My amazing housekeeper does it first, so I don’t need to do it. But I find it relaxing – it’s so beautiful and shiny once I’ve done it. Plus, I don’t have to do any of the dirty work because the inside cleans itself, so it’s just soothing, superficial cleaning. I do like a bit of ironing too, as long as it’s in front of the TV. It’s more relaxing to clean up with stuff that doesn’t look awful. Most of my cleaning equipment is pretty old but my husband and I bought some glamorous loo brushes a while ago.

HOW TO CLEAN YOUR SINK

1. Take all the dishes out of the sink.

2. Run some very hot water into the sink. Fill to the rim. Then pour a cup of household bleach into the hot water. Let it sit for 1 hour. Now pull the plug with a pair of tongs. If you don’t have tongs, then scoop some of the water out of the sink into the other sink and use your hand to pull the plug (wear gloves and don’t get bleach water on your clothes).

3. Rinse your sink well.

4. Use cleanser and scrub your sink. Rinse ALL of the cleanser from the sink.

5. Take a sharp edge and clean around the rim of the sink, just as you would clean dirt from under your fingernails.

6. Clean around the taps, too. You may need an old toothbrush or dental floss.

7. Now get out your window cleaner and give it a good shine.

8. If you still don’t like the way it looks, then you could try some car wax. Just know in your heart that you have cleaned it very well now and it doesn’t have to be perfect. Our perfectionism is what got us in this situation in the first place.

9. Every time you run water in your sink, take your clean dishtowel and dry it out (I lay out a clean one, every night with my before-bedtime routine). Before you know it, you will be doing this every time you leave your kitchen. The rest of the family will too. No more water spots. You will have a clean and shiny sink.

10. Don’t have a fit if someone doesn’t take as much pride in your sink as you do. You will never have to go through this process again. Daily maintenance will keep it looking this way all the time.

11. If you don’t have a dishwasher, don’t worry. A dishwasher is just a dirty dish disposal. Clean out a place under your sink and put a dishpan in there. Teach your family to put their dirty dishes and glasses in the dish pan. Get into the habit of putting your dishes away as soon as they have been washed and are dry. No more leaving the dish-drying rack on the counter or in the sink. Put it away under the sink when you have finished. If your old one is nasty, soak it in the sink full of bleach water at the same time as you soak the sink or go to buy a new set.

12. To ensure that your family remembers this, put a note in the sink. It will get their attention and remind them where to put the dishes. Be patient! They have never been taught either. It is going to take some practice. Now if you have a stainless-steel sink, I recommend all of the above directions with one extra instruction: after you soak your sink, rinse well, and use SOS pads to scrub it. This will buff the finish. It will look like new. If you still can’t get it to shine after the cleaning, put a light coat of lemon oil or olive oil on it. I mean just a tiny bit on a cloth and rub it. This will make you smile.

www.flylady.net

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