Corona Chronicles: Does reading a book and drinking a gin while lying in the sun count as housework? 

– Opinion –

So when I arrived at my ‘work-from-home-office’ on Friday, I was dismayed to see that the cleaning staff had not wiped down my desk or emptied my dustbin from the day before. There were rusk crumbs and tea cup rings all over. I drew myself up to my full 1.64-and-a-half metres and walked stiff-legged to go find management to complain. Then I remembered I am management and I am am also the cleaning staff!

My domestic worker, Rebecca, has been with us for seventy ‘eleventy’ years (okay so only 23 but she is very much part of our family). She is so good that for years my one friend had ‘Rebecca envy’! But right now she is safe at home with her family in Dobsonville, and I am trying to do her job, while being surgically attached to my desk trying to fulfill all the demands and many, many, many lists required by my day job. So yesterday was no rest for me. It was ‘up and at ’em’ to tackle household stuff.

I started with the stove… And that’s as far as I got. I had made the schoolgirl error the night before of messing oil all over my gas hob, which required a proper ‘mom’ clean. Whoever invented gas stoves, was it really necessary to have so many annoying little parts? There is a ‘thingamagotchy’ that covers the ‘doomaflab’ that fits over the ‘pointy lighter thingy’. Not to forget the heavy iron prison bars that you rest the pots on and could easily use for weight lifting if you don’t have weights at home! Forty-three hours later I was feeling quite faint, so I had to take time out to have a small medicinal glass of wine to ease my shattered nerves.