The Yummy Mummy’s Family Handbook. Liz Fraser

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       PART FIVE The Utility Room

      I always suspected that I was a little peculiar, but now I am quite sure, at night, I sometimes dream of utility rooms. A place I can put all the noisy kitchen appliances and shut the door on their whirring, humming, spinning and clanking. Alas, I can only dream of such luxury, but hopefully you are more fortunate and don’t have to share your evening meal with a washing machine and seven loads of ironing still waiting to be done.

      Here we shall look at family chores, who does them, and how to cut down on the elbow grease.

      My Not-So-Beautiful Launderette

      Living in a family is a dirty affair. It’s grimy, sweaty, muddy, stained and smelly. Of course, living alone is often not the cleanest existence either—how many bachelor pads have clean tea towels or a scrubbed toilet floor?—but a family dwelling produces more filth than seems possible or manageable at times.

      If somebody had told me, before I embarked on this ‘getting married and having kids’ journey, that I would require a degree in cleaning techniques and that a considerable portion of my waking life would be taken up with my head in a laundry basket, I might have reconsidered. It’s not that I have an especially mucky or careless family: talking to many friends, I know that they live with the same level of spillages, stains and general gunk as I do, and none of us would consider ourselves unusually wild or unruly.

      Children are, of course, the primary culprits. It is very, very usual for me to have to change my three-year-old within an hour of getting him dressed, because half of his porridge is down his front, he found some chalk and smeared it into his shirt, or he sat on a wet cloth in the bathroom. If they do make it beyond 9 a.m. without a change of clothes, it is almost inconceivable that any of my kids will come home from school in any garments fit for a second day’s wearing: paint, sand, felt-tip, somebody else’s lunch and several unidentifiable and quite unsettling marks will be found on everything from their tights to their hair like a sticky, smelly snapshot of their day.

      Generalising wildly, men aren’t much better. Watching most men eat, I wonder why somebody hasn’t produced designer Man Bibs—like overgrown toddlers they drop, spill and splat their food, seemingly oblivious to the fact that other people manage this task without such trouble. Then there’s sweat—Man Sweat—which means no shirt can be worn more than once, if it even makes it beyond midday before becoming unacceptably whiffy. Socks reek of overripe blue cheese and gym kits morph into a stinking, sweaty heap, having often resided in an airtight bag for more than a week.

      Women—actually, let’s say mothers, as most childless women keep themselves reasonably clean as far as I can tell—bring their fair share of dirt and household cleaning into the equation: most of my clothes end up splattered with some child-related gunk by the end of the day, my shoes are worn out by all the dashing about and need regular cleaning and re-heeling, and I almost never take my shoes off when I come into the house, either because I get straight into unpacking the shopping and cooking for my starving children, or because I am more than likely to be going outside again very soon to play football in the garden or take the newly-fed children to some extracurricular activity or other. This means my house is often littered with bits of grass, twigs and mud.

      Yes, living in a busy, modern family brings with it a large amount of mess and dirt, and if you don’t adopt some strategies for dealing with it, you could soon drown in your own dirty laundry. Luckily for you, I have picked up some tips along the way, which I pass on here to ease the strain and free up some ‘me’ time for you, in between spin-cycles.