03.01.06..12:56 pm

Last September Lula came home from Spain, took a disgusted whiff of the flat and promptly stormed about pouring bleach over every surface she could find. You may recall that she was coming home to a flat in which two theses and a Linbury Prize model box had been undergone during the month that she had been away. While inventing tasty new recipes using three previously uncombined ingredients may be my way of inspiring new ways in which to pun villains and discover James Bond�s abjection of his existence, Procrastination By Cleaning was on no one�s agenda.

While I concurred that the flat was a stinky pit of doom, at the time I secretly harboured the opinion that Lula was a mite crazy -- of course, two weeks later it was discovered that Lula had a tumour in a blood vessel in her brain and wasn�t exactly herself in any manner of speaking, but a tumour does not (necessarily) crazy make. In a conversation had while squatting on the only unscoured perch in the premises, Lula admitted to me that she thought her radical attack on the build up of bacteria was likely due to having been in the care of her mother for the previous month whose house appeared before my eyes as a vision of purity and song. A dustless, grime-free palace where Dettol reigned supreme and Messers Proctor and Gamble lived in the spare bedroom. During her mother�s stay in our flat, my mind frequently wandered back to that conversation because whatever nick she may have kept her own abode in, Mrs Lula paid no heed to the state of ours. The fantasy of entertaining the Good Fairy Mother for whom floors and toilets magically sparkled and shone faded each time I swept the kitchen floor or scraped dried tomato sauce from the stove top or had to fish tomatoes out from under open packs of bologna. Mr Clean did not sneak his way into the country in Mrs Lula�s suitcase.

Which brings me to my own homecoming five days ago wherein I walked through the door weighed down by an extortionate amount of luggage � somehow assessed as under the maximum load by the very nice people at Alitalia whose cheque is in the mail � and nearly passed out. I swear something DIED in the water pipes in my absence. On a stack of variously attributed leather-bound religious tenets. It not only died, but in it�s last attempt at making sure I�d find it spewed wads of hair in the bath tub, moulted beside the garbage bin and threw faeces on my bed. Instead of helping my dearheart wrap presents to be distributed amongst his family mere hours after we landed I found myself elbow deep in Ecover.

Determined to start the year the way I mean it to go on, I�ve spent the past few days scrubbing floors, sinks, the bath tub and, this morning while waiting for my coffee to brew itself to perfection, spraying Dettol Mould Remover at the kitchen ceiling.

While most people would have put away the freshly cleaned dishes drying in the rack, or removed the bamboo plant from the window sill, or waited until the air was clear before popping a piece of organic bread in the toaster, or at very least put a sheet down over everything, I soldiered on. I ignored the recommendation that Dettol Mould Remover be used only by persons were anti-nuclear fallout coveralls and a gas mask, I deemed the suggested use of rubber gloves for sissies. I Did Not use the dish cloth for mould removal purposes and I didn�t like that tea towel anyway.

I sit here now, hallucinating only very slightly, and hope that the burning sensation on my index finger passes with time and pray the hairs in my nostrils grow back before my birthday.