Everyone's coming home!

Note to self: men in their twenties do not check for dust.

My adult kids are all coming home for the weekend. These days, this generally happens only at Christmas. But it’s our daughter’s graduation today so her brothers are heading back to Glasgow to celebrate with her. And I find myself doing the thing I do, when the kids are due to come home.

I’m not big on cleaning normally, thinking:

1. You might as well let it build up until it really needs doing. Then the contrast - and associated level of satisfaction - is so much greater.

2. However hard I try, our flat never looks gleamingly clean in the way that, say, a hotel does. So there’s never that feeling of having done a brilliant job.

3. I have tried to trick myself into enjoying cleaning by employing ‘fun’ tactics such as setting a timer (do the kitchen in 15 minutes!) and listening to podcasts and music and even being drunk. But it’s still really sodding tedious.

Yet now I’m rushing around with the new floor mop I bought specially, which squirts out (also newly purchased) rhubarb-scented liquid at the press of a button. I’m hoovering the rug that’s somehow gone disgustingly crunchy during the course of the Euros so far.

It’s full of crisps, I discover! Like 85% crisp to 15% wool. Has Gary Lineker been here, flinging cheese and onion about? On closer inspection I also find evidence of crumbled Pringles and Doritos nestling deep down. While I’ve been avoiding the footie there’s been a salty snackfest going on. On top of that I’m emptying stinky bins and scrubbing the loo and WHY AM I DOING THIS? Our homecoming sons don’t care. What man in his twenties do you know who checks for dust?

When to comes to projecting an image you’d think it’d be the kids who’d want to impress Mum and Dad. ‘Look how sorted I am, how well I’m doing!’ But it doesn’t work that way. It’s me who wants to impress them. I want them to see that their father and I have been functioning marvellously in their absence - taking up gardening, keeping an orderly fridge. And that, although our parenting style was always somewhat ramshackle, we’ve really got ourselves together now.

Of course this is madness. I am MOTHER! I should be boss here and who cares what anyone thinks of my lifestyle choices? Besides, they all know what we’re like - having known us since birth - so there’s no need to act like royalty are coming.

And yet… just a few years ago, when our sons had moved out - but weren’t as far away as the 400 miles they are now - they’d come home on a visit and do something that irked me so much.

‘The dog’s got fat,’ they’d say.

Jack in more slender times

‘No he hasn’t,’ I’d protest as he waddled towards us and flumped heavily onto a cushion. I resented it so much - the implication that, left to our own devices, we’d succumbed to feeding him table scraps and let things slide.

I’m sorry, but look how well cared for he was!

As our Jack is no longer with us, it’s not an issue any more. But it still rankles.

I’m not alone in this. I was chatting to a friend today whose son is about to visit from New Zealand and she’s madly sorting through her spices, binning garam masala with a sell by date corresponding with the first year Tony Blair won a general election HEY MAYBE IT’S A SIGN!!!

Anyway, with an hour before my sons’ expected arrival, I’m still haring around with the anti-bac spray, thinking if we did have another dog, he’d be a supermodel of the pooch world - nabbing those lucrative Pedigree Chum ad campaigns and refusing to get out of his basket for less than 26 pigs’ ears a day.

Then to my utmost shame I find a clump of Jack-fur lurking under a radiator even though he departed this earth over two years ago—

OMG the doorbell! *Smoothes hair, takes a breath… inhales the heady aroma of Mr Sheen.

Hi, boys! Welcome home!

Love,

Fiona xx

PS If you’ve ever felt close to blowing your lid over domestic matters, then my newest novel, The Woman Who Ran Away From Everything, is perfect for you. And you can order here!