Thursday 28th August, 2003 – Cleaning

I'm not sure if it is anything to do with the advent of old age, now that I'm a decrepit 26 year-old, but I seem to be becoming a crotchety, Victor Meldrew-ish curmudgeon. Over the past few weeks, I've noticed myself becoming needlessly vexed over the most minor things. See my manhood-related rant of a couple of days ago.

I have just been mediumly rude to the lady who cleans my office because she had the audacity to request that she be allowed to do her job. I was in the middle of some horrible statistical work - so in many ways, the interruption was a blessing - when she came in with her vacuum cleaner and asked me if I was busy. I was halfway through something, and I'd rather have been allowed to complete it, but in truth it was nothing that I couldn't easily come back to.

But, for some reason, I felt violated by her interruption. My subconscious somehow managed to associate this lady asking if she could clean my office with every other slightly annoying thing that has happened to me for the last fortnight, placing her at the head of a vast, global conspiracy to inconvenience me. So, instead of simply agreeing to her polite request, I theatrically furrowed my brow and, in a deliberately distracted and weary voice, said "Um…yes…yes, I suppose so" and semi-flounced out of the room.

I immediately felt like an enormous twat, but it was too late to make amends by this point. What is happening to me? I don't want to turn into one of those people who wanders round on a hair-trigger of exasperation, just waiting for something to happen so that they can sigh loudly and shake their heads. Is this my future?

It could be worse. Being a killjoy might be unflattering at my age, but when I am 70-odd, I will be cantankerous and eccentric, and people will love me for my eeyorish, dryly-humorous worldview.

So, only 44 years of being a pitiful young fogey to go.

Perhaps the cleaner lady would like to come round to our flat. We have visitors this weekend, so the next 24 hours will be a whirlwind of scrubbing, hiding and disinfecting. It is not that we live in squalor as such. Our flat is just in a permanent state of low-level disarray. The piles of pants in he bathroom; the stacks of crossword pages and bank statements on the old computer box that doubles as a bedside table; the ominous, listing mound of plastic bags in the comer of the kitchen; the chaotic tendrils of dental floss poking from the mouth of the bathroom bin.

The problem is, in fact, that the messiness of our house is so pervasive that, when it is cleaned, it seems strangely empty and Spartan. The clutter has become our excuse for décor and, when this is removed, the place has en eerie, un-lived-in quality. Only the indelible teabag-splatters behind the swing bin suggest that the place has ever been inhabited.