Confessions of a student spring cleaner

Hi, my name is Jessica, and I’m a neat-freak. OCD about organisation. Addicted to absolute cleanliness.

As you are all probably well aware, students are not the tidiest of creatures, yet my housemates this year – four of my best girlfriends – are all consciously clean creatures. I’ve done well.

Going to other friends’ houses I marvel in the chaos that is theirs, and the order that is mine. I see plates congealing with five-day-old food. Mugs used as ashtrays. Unclaimed stale socks in the living room. Sour milk leaking in the fridge. My glee quickly turns into nausea, anxiety, a nervous feeling in my stomach.

I return to my cosy house of clean crockery and well-stacked cupboards, where washing up and laundry are done quickly and without fuss, even if it is slightly annoying that I have to make a trip to the OP laundry room every ten days to dry my bed sheets, lest they touch the floor when hanging wet in the bathroom.

But while my housemates and I make every effort to keep a tidy house, a world away from the horrors described above, it seems as though the house itself won’t let us. Why does that horrible black mouldy stuff still appear on the grouting in the bath when I cleaned it a few days ago? Why is the sink looking grey again? Why are there little nooks and crannies which are, in all honesty, simply grim? And what is with this dust?! Dust, dust everywhere. You dust and the dust doth not depart.

It doesn’t help sharing the top floor with two other girls who also have very long hair, and therefore moult constantly. It’s sickening. And heartbreaking. Mr. Muscle has let me down.

Yet the cherry on top of a very unpleasant cake was when last week my housemate heard a scratching… a squeaking… and a mouse scurried across the kitchen floor. A mouse. You have got to be joking. A mouse – vermin – in my kitchen? Me, the cleanest, neatest, most tidy girl in all the land? I was, and still am, incensed, exasperated and offended.

PETA members look away now but I have vowed to have that mouse destroyed by any means. Bait boxes and traps have been laid, and I am close to inviting the neighbour’s cat in for a Tom and Jerry style-session.

While I am trying to not let my situation upset me too much, I can’t help feeling cheated – Manchester, how has this happened to me? And what can I do about it? Well, I’ll tell what I’m gonna do about it, and it’s an ensemble involving marigolds, bleach, an old toothbrush and a hoover. Watch this space. This very neat, clean, white space.