Ménage

One of the reasons my husband left me was because of my lack of housekeeping skills – that and the fact that I didn’t look like Catherine Zeta-Jones. And he was right. I don’t look like Catherine Zeta-Jones and my house does look like a Picasso painting. Actually, I realized years ago that there is a cosmic conspiracy against me: I don't touch anything yet during the night, paperwork, books, dust, small change, pencils, CDs, make-up, socks, coffee cups etc start to breed and I wake up drowning in a writhing primeval soup of clutter.

I keep all sorts of useless bits of paper like cinema tickets, flyers and grocery receipts but still manage to lose insurance documents, bills and doctors’ prescriptions. To make matters worse, the French government tell you to keep certain documents ‘indefinitely’. This type of statement is guaranteed to plunge me into hoarding overdrive and I now have the equivalent of 3 squared kilometres of Amazonian rainforest stuffed into cardboard boxes under my table, just in case.

I would take a photo of my clutter to show you but…I seem to have mislaid my camera. And if you wanted to look at Catherine Zeta-Jones, that's just tough. Here's a picture of me instead...