Guests are coming to stay for Christmas. Let the charade begin

3 months ago 19

Opinion

December 6, 2025 — 5.30am

I’m flat on my stomach in the bathroom, my nose pressed against the floor drain. There’s been an elusive smell in here for months. It can’t be the toilet, as I’ve already bombed it with chemicals. You’re aware of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction? People say they never existed, but I’ve recently sourced them all from Bunnings.

I assume they worked. And, if it’s not the toilet, it must be the floor drain. I have a feeling it’s not connected to any pipes. It’s just a portal into the underworld. I lie on my belly, sniffing like a truffle hound, but nothing. Give it another half-hour of pointless sniffing, and I may have worked up enough energy to stand up.

The real gift of Christmas is being forced to clean the house for the first time in a year.

We’ve lived with the weird smell for months, so why the sudden flurry of activity? Christmas, of course. Guests from overseas are coming to stay. It’s my eldest son and his family. Do nothing and they will realise we live like pigs in our own filth. And so the great clean-up begins.

First off will be the toughest jobs. But how do you rank the Worst Household Tasks of All Time?

The worst occupation, of course, is trying to identify a weird smell in your bathroom. First, it involves getting down on your belly. Next, it involves sniffing heartily in the hope of smelling something bad. Finally, you always fail to achieve a solution.

I prop open the window in the bathroom, hoping that might make a difference, and move onto the second-worst job. This involves changing the sheets on the bed in the main bedroom. We’re good people! We always give guests the main room with the king bed. But why is it called a “king”? It’s because the only people who buy them should be actual royals with an extensive domestic staff.

It’s late in the day to attempt to convince my son that his father isn’t an idiot, but it’s worth a try.

Otherwise, you are the one who has to get the washed doona cover back onto the doona. It’s not a queen, that’s easy. It’s not a double, which is the work of seconds. No, this is the real deal. It’s a king, and the particular king, I’m guessing, is Henry VIII. The thing is so huge. So I pull the doona cover inside out, then climb into it, grasping the doona itself though the fabric, then dance around like a ghost having a seizure.

I pull the doona into the cover, dance around some more, and then flick it onto the bed. It never quite works, and so I have to crawl back inside the cover, trying to push one end into one corner without disturbing the other corner I managed to get right. Chance of success: nil.

Next, I have to wash my lace curtains. Oh, you didn’t know I was an ingénue in a Jane Austen novel? Anyway, they were so filthy I had to wash them twice, with a good bleaching in between wash one and two.

Then up on a ladder to clean the accumulated dust off the ceiling fan. Please don’t tell my health insurer, as I wish to stay insured.

I remove the downmarket novel on my bedside table and replace it with a slim volume of Elizabethan poetry. It’s late in the day to attempt to convince my son that his father isn’t an idiot, but it’s worth a try. I throw out the cables that fitted a printer I had 10 years ago. I dust, then dust again.

Next, I must pluck hair from the drain in the shower recess. Before this moment, I hadn’t realised I’d been living with Rapunzel. After a bit of fishing, out it comes like a slimy creature from the deepest oceans. If I knew a wigmaker, I could sell my catch.

The lint filter in the dryer is cleaned out. So too is the filter in the washing machine, the contents of which make the Shower Plug Hair Monster look like a thing of beauty.

The back windows are cleaned, thus removing two years’ worth of children’s fingerprints and 500 smudges from a dog’s wet nose. Crumbs are removed from the cutlery drawer, leaving me to ponder how they got in there in the first place since we never eat toast. Maybe thieves have been coming in during the day, making toast with their own bread, and then leaving the crumbs.

Mould is removed from the skirting boards in the hallway. Sprouting potatoes are identified and binned. Tubs of humus, which expired during the Gillard government, are removed from the fridge.

Finally, it’s the day before the big visit. The sun streams in through my blindingly white lace curtains, the light catching on the gleaming blades of the ceiling fan. The slim volume of Elizabethan poetry gestures for attention, posing coquettishly on the bedside table.

In the shower, water gurgles happily down the free-flowing plughole. The bathroom smells of little but the three containers of Air Wick Pure Freshmatic Cherry Blossom Air Freshener that I was finally forced to unleash.

It’s so lovely to live here, it makes we wonder why I don’t clean up as I go, rather than once every three years. Perhaps that’s the real gift of Christmas.

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