KEY POINTS:
Have you ever taken anything back out of the dirty clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleaner thing? How many things are there, at this moment, in the wrong room - cups in the study, boots in the kitchen and how many are on the floor of the wrong room?'
Katharine Whitehorn wrote this in an essay in praise of sluttish living in 1963. You could say she was the original slummy mummy. I love her.
But 45 years later, the pressure to be perfect at home, at work, with your kids, your looks, is more oppressive than ever. It has got to be time for standards to slip.
Not for everything, mind. Good chocolate must still have 70 per cent cocoa solids. But does it really matter if your children eat instant noodles every day for a week?
There is an edifying new trend towards sloppiness, with slacker mom books like the Three Martini Playdate and Mommies who Drink. But this is not the liberation from Stepford Wifedom that it seems. It has become unfashionable to be too neurotic about your offspring - the "cotton wool generation" - or your work - "no one ever wished on their deathbed they had spent more time at the office". So everyone feels obliged to claim they are terribly relaxed with a great work/life balance but they still don't want to get caught out with a dirty toilet.
Pretending to be all languid and insouciant is just another stress to add to the list - they feign insouciance but when you arrive at their house it's like a Ralph Lauren commercial. It's like those frightful job applicants who, when asked about their weaknesses, say they wish they weren't so tidy.
As a person who has dog hair in the bed, something that looks suspiciously like rat droppings in my pantry and mouldy banana skins in the car, I find fake Bohemians annoying.
Since the credit crunch we have heard a lot about banks giving 100 per cent home loans and credit being so easy to get. At the same time, there are endless sob stories about how wholesome scrubbed-face young couples can't manage to cobble together a deposit for a house.
Surely both can't be true. Or maybe they are. Possibly there are two separate markets for mortgages: one for the perky middle class who look for a mortgage from a major trading bank, and one for the strugglers who are happy to take money from bottom-feeding finance companies.
And that means as house prices drop, the bourgeois couple will be able to nab a bargain while the blue collar bunch will lose theirs.
My sympathy is running low for the young things who complain about house prices while specifying they only want to live in Herne Bay. My parents' generation had to go cap in hand to building societies to get a loan. Although in the 1960s they could have afforded Herne Bay - it was slummy then.
