Now there is a word that I hadn’t heard for years until I was trying to put my blog page together yesterday.  For me, and I would imagine quite a lot of my age group in the UK, a widget was the ‘first generation’ Guinness widget which was launched in 1988.  I reckon a bloke must have invented it because only the really cool stuff like Kevlar is invented by women.  When word got out, men all over Britain couldn’t wait to get their hands on a can; not just for the intoxicating delight of a pseudo draught of gassy beer that could be enjoyed at home, and saved a walk around the corner to the local pub, but so they could take it apart with a hacksaw on your kitchen counter and ‘away with it to the shed’ to figure out this magical unseen device, how it worked and what it was capable of.

If you’d told a man back then that you had a widget hidden somewhere in your lady parts they’d have been  tinkering away with you for hours, unless of course you had something more important to do, like say, clean your oven.

Which reminds me of what I actually meant to blog about today.  I really wanted to call this post ‘Confessions of a dirty housewife’ but I’m not entirely convinced that my spam filter works against Smutsville yet.  I’m in between due assignments and realising just how much cleaning I haven’t done in the past fortnight.  So before I fall back into that old guilt cycle (and especially because the Big Fella is having a super day out playing golf, and not sat here looking at it all the lucky, lucky man) I’m going to remind myself, and share with you, my “do’s and dont’s of housework”;

1. DO clean the shower whilst you are actually in there washing yourself to save time.
2. DON’T accidently use Shower Power on your privates.
3. DO go to the gym more often instead of cleaning the house – whoever came up with the calculation that housework is the equivalent of a good workout is a fuckwit.  Any calories you burn will be offset by the counter effects on your body of feeling bitter, resentful and stressed because you’re on your hands and knees cleaning a toilet and not in an environment where people are motivating you to feel better about yourself. You will also end up with more ‘body image issues’ associated with overdeveloped Popeye forearms from all those hours of pushing a vacuum around.
4. DON’T waste time with the latest eco cleaning advice from A Current Affair, (its not current, even when it’s about the latest celebrities ‘current affair’).  Your stainless steel may look shiny and smell refreshing if you’ve buffed it with half a lemon and some bicarb but you’ll be back at the shops in no time getting some hard core chemicals to clean off all that pulp and pith it left behind.  Plus, ‘eco’ people tend to save this sort of stuff in their fridge to ‘re-use’, and trust me,  no one wants to end up with a slice of THAT in their G & T.
5. DO value yourself more than bricks and mortar, you really are worth so much more than a house, and if your friends and acquaintances care more about how clean your house looks than whether you are knackered, unwell and haven’t washed your hair for days ‘because you simply don’t have any time to’ then they are really not worth having in your life.
6. DON’T put off a visitor because you haven’t tidied up yet “Darling, Penelope and Stephen are going to drop by isn’t that marvellous?”….”Oh God no Jeffrey, they just simply can’t!! I haven’t prepared canapés or cleaned the toilet so it sparkles, or washed the curtains; I simply haven’t had time because some woman told me I should be exercising my widget more, you’ll just have to ring them back and cancel!!”
7. DO stop worrying about how often you should wash your bedding, “you mean you don’t wash yours every week? How dreadful, how do you sleep at night?!”, very well actually, considerably better I should imagine than a homeless person does, particularly at the moment when it is so cold in BrisVegas on a night.  Better I would imagine than the poor person who just had a box and a dirty rag in the stair well at Abi; “what’s that you say? Right next to those beautiful parklands at Southbank,  Good God how disgusting” –(as if homeless people don’t have a right to find somewhere as pleasant as possible to spend a night that is safe and dry, and near to a public toilet, not in it).  My bed is like a nest, it’s warm and cosy and it smells of us because we don’t actually want to share it with Penelope or Stephen thanks.
8. DON’T  EVER, EVER ‘just add whatever needs doing’ to your husband’s list; If you cave in to that sort of diversion he will have the physical written evidence that you are a nag and need to get a life, and frankly, if he doesn’t already notice or care about what needs doing around the place neither should you.

We all know how SJP ‘does it’; she has a whole wad of money to pay someone else so that she has time to look after herself properly.  No one is memorable a hundred years after their death for keeping a clean house.  Yes alright, there was Mrs Beeton, let me clarify, I mean ‘someone worth remembering’.  If there ever was a woman who should have had her widget fiddled with more often it was her.