Housework

I’ve returned from three weeks’ holiday in Malaysia, to find the garbage scow that is my house listing badly and taking in water. The swimming pool has gone rotten and looks like a tar pit, I haven’t seen my bedroom floor in days, and Frankie and Stankie (the labrador and pug) have colonised the ziggurat of dirty laundry in the scalectrix room and are turning feral. The digsmates have fled for parts unknown, leaving no forwarding addresses.

Agri, my Zimbabwean butler/houseboy has been home on holiday for three weeks now. He normally does the gardening, housecleaning and laundry. I live in a large, drafty, lopsided four bedroom house that without his constant attention would slowly collapse in on itself like a flan in a cupboard. Now before you self-cleaning First World types roll your eyes; my generation grew up in ‘70s South Africa in similarly preposterously large houses that would be totally unviable without servants to keep them afloat. As a result, we are lazy, spoilt, apartheid brats that are hopeless at surviving in the wild.

I’ve tried to blame my procrastination on jetlag, but as I’ve been home for a week now, this excuse is becoming untenable.