Spring Clean

I have a magnet on my fridge that says: My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance and another that quite rightly proclaims: Dull women have immaculate houses.

However, as my French Windows have been looking a tad grubby lately, I decided to do a bit of Spring Cleaning. Well, it is the school holidays so I can hardly use lack of time as an excuse.

Once I’d located the broom and the duster, I set to work. I unearthed a few surprises along the way: furry fruit, mummified pizza, unpaid bills, the phone, the cat…I also threw a lot of things in the bin. The experience was so traumatic, I started to have doubts about the benefits of this cleaning lark. Then I remembered the time I was rushed to hospital after I’d squirted concentrated bleach into my eye and how, more recently, I nearly broke my nose when I walked slap-bang into the French windows because they were so clean…and that settled it. Housework is far too dangerous for the likes of me.

So I turned my attention to DIY – which stands for Destroy It Yourself, as I’m sure you know. I’d been meaning to put up a shelf in the kitchen for over a year (I need more surfaces to pile stuff on) and this seemed like the ideal opportunity. I grabbed the drill...

Now, I’m a bit nervous of drills – I’m afraid they’ll somehow leap out of my hand and turn on me in a frenzied, unprovoked attack and someone will find me the next day lying perforated beneath the stepladder. So I was very, very careful.

I drilled the first hole. Almost immediately, a whistling, whooshing sound filled the kitchen (it wasn’t that loud, but it’s a small kitchen). What had I done? I put my ear to the wall: it sounded like I’d drilled into Hades. Would the wall fall down? Maybe the kitchen was going to explode. Maybe the whole block of flats would suddenly collapse!

Fortunately, the housing office is just around the corner, so I ran and told them what I’d done.

“You’ve drilled into the ventilation shaft,” they said with a chuckle. “Not to worry.”

Still, it put me off drilling any more holes. I resorted to my old favourites of glue and double-sided carpet tape for the rest of the DIY jobs and it all looks perfectly fine.

The next thing I need to do, of course, is Spring Clean my mind. There’s an awful lot of clutter up there and one or two things I really ought to get rid of…but perhaps it can wait. I mean, it’s not even spring yet, is it?