et in Arcadia ego

Finally, the housework caught up with me.  One might have expected that on a day that was warm and sunny, albeit blowing half a gale, I'd have been pulling up horsetail, or finishing planting up the bog, or moving the pots of geraniums out of the greenhouse.  I didn't like to risk moving them outside until last week, in case of one final overnight frost.  However, I wasn't doing any of these things, but spending a nice day cleaning the kitchen and vacuuming cat fur off the sitting room, and going to Tesco to buy courgettes and creme fraiche.

The immediate trigger for such a perverse outbreak of domesticity was that I'd invited a friend to supper, while the Systems Administrator is off with a friend at Trent Bridge.  I try to be careful not to mention to guests that I've spent the day of their visit cleaning, or that I don't like cleaning very much, since this would sound ungracious, and the cleaning isn't their fault.  The house needs to be cleaned periodically, so an impending visit doesn't create the necessity for housework, merely determines the timing of it.  In fact, given that I don't like cleaning, it's just as well that we do occasionally invite people round and are nudged into doing something about the state of the kitchen floor and the clouds of cat fur before they become a health hazard.

I like having a clean house, or at least a cleaner house.  Shiny cupboard fronts, crumb-free worktops, rugs that don't have an additional layer of fur overlaying the ethnic weave beneath, walls that aren't fretted with odd strands of cat hair, non-sticky place mats, clean hand towels, the loo smelling vaguely and reassuringly of Toilet Duck, side tables that aren't lightly spotted with red wine, light shades that don't suddenly and embarrassingly reveal themselves to contain a layer of detritus consisting of small dead flies, dust and more cat fur.  When I have accomplished these things I feel cleaner and shinier myself, reassured that chaos has been thrust back along with the vague possibility of infection.  It feels virtuous and comforting and nice.  I just don't like cleaning

Maybe I would like it more if I were better at it, or did it oftener and more conscientiously so that the end results were more impressive.  After an hour of scrubbing at the grease spots on the Aga, using two different sorts of proprietary cleaning product, one for chrome and steel and the other for enamel, and chasing dust and cat fur round it, I have to admit to myself that it is still not like the ones in the showroom, or in other people's houses who don't have four cats, and employ a competent cleaner, or wipe their Aga with proper Aga cleaning pastes oftener than once every three weeks.  Maybe because it is an electric one it seems to carry a static charge that attracts dust, and cat fur, and after an hour of wiping I can still see odd strands, and tide marks where the last swipe of the cloth got to, while there are still deposits around the hinges of the top plates which it would take me the rest of the day to remove, and I don't have the rest of the day.  It isn't really a clean Aga at all, just a lot shinier than it was, and it will have to do, just as the draining board and the sink will have to do, because to get them back to a showroom state of shininess would require the application of at least an entire bottle of limescale remover.  I don't really want that much industrial chemical running down into the septic tank, and I don't have the rest of the afternoon to spend scouring.

It's the same with the vacuuming.  I go diligently round and round the room, trying and failing to avoid getting the flex wound round the furniture and my legs.  A great deal of fluff came off the carpets and the pouffes today, even though the Systems Administrator gave it all a vacuum only a week ago.  After I have put the vacuum cleaner away I see bits that I missed, like the ethnic rug on the table in the downstairs sitting room which I completely overlooked, while new random bits of fur and dirt have appeared and settled in the time it took me to walk upstairs, open the spare room door, and put the vacuum cleaner away.  If we were to vacuum the house oftener maybe there wouldn't be such a reservoir of fluff lurking.  Maybe I would have a better routine and not forget the downstairs table.  Maybe the vacuumed house would look really, sparklingly clean, instead of merely appearing less obviously grubby.

In Poussin's pastoral paintings, shepherds gather around a tomb on which is inscribed Virgil's warning, et in Arcadia ego.  So it is here with housework.  Even in the middle of the rustic idyll, housework lurks.  I will never do enough of it, and it will never go away.  Tomorrow I am not going to clean the dust off the cases of the CDs racked under the stairs, even though they are very dusty.  Instead, I am going to move the geraniums out of the greenhouse.

ladies who lunch

I spent a large part of today shopping and cooking for tomorrow's lunch, after spending yesterday cleaning.  I don't really like cleaning, or at least I infinitely prefer gardening, so asking friends around is a good incentive to do something about the state of the house occasionally.  I like having a clean house when it's done, so I don't grudge my friends the effort, and anyway one of the most off-putting things I know in a host is when they grumble about the trouble they went to getting ready for you.  A good host is like a swan.  Even if it's paddling madly under water, all should appear serene on the surface.

The amount of cleaning people get depends partly on how well I know them, on whether they have been to the house before, and how messy their own houses are.  I do make less of an effort for friends who have dogs running around their kitchens and wear their wellingtons indoors than for the pet-free with light coloured fitted carpets in their houses.  Tomorrow's guest list includes two people on their first visit, one of whom runs a professional B&B, and when I dropped a tree stake off at her house after work as a favour she gave me tea out of a silver tea pot, and the other I don't think is a pet owner, though she does have teenage boys so must be reasonably inured to mess.  Partly in deference to them, and because it needed doing, I did more than a quick wipe and vacuum, and hoovered a lot of cat fur off the curtains.  The cats are already busy applying fresh fur to every surface.  My list of things to do tomorrow morning, after various final bits of cooking and key things like cleaning the loo, ends with final vacuum, if time.  I'm not sure there'll be time.

I never know how much food to do.  It seems nice to offer choice.  Nobody's a vegetarian (or at least if they are they should have told me) but not everyone likes red meat, or some flavours, so I ended up with a choice of main courses and puddings.  I have a horror of anyone not being able to have what they want, so that means enough of both to feed everyone, if they should all go for the same thing.  That's not a problem.  The leftovers will keep us going over the weekend, and we can freeze some of them.  I seem to have panicked in Tesco, as I really can't work out why I bought so many onions, but they'll keep.  I did a blueberry cheesecake, and then a chocolate cake in case anybody doesn't really like fruit, or blueberries, or cheesecake.  I spent years feeding fruit puddings to my sister-in-law, who is an extremely polite woman and never complained, before noticing that she never actually ate more than a spoonful, and the penny finally dropped that she hated apple crumble and much preferred chocolate.

I have done red cabbage, in homage to my Polish great grandparents, and because I like it and it goes with goulash, and improves with re-heating, as does goulash.  The goulash was simmered for at least four hours, and is still tougher than I'd like, so that's going straight back in the simmer oven as soon as I get up.  In recent years I have succumbed to the System Administrator's method, and now add passata.  When I was growing up it never had passata in it, just maybe a spoonful of tomato paste.  You need to put a lot of onions into a good goulash.  Really a lot of onions.  They should be an equivalent weight to the meat.  And a lot of paprika.  Then I made a chicken casserole, as anybody who doesn't like red meat or paprika will definitely not like goulash.  I was relieved to be able to buy packets of free range legs and thighs, as otherwise I might have ended up buying non free range because it was too late to think of anything else.  Shallots, mushrooms and snippets of bacon went into the chicken.

The chocolate cake is basically cooked chocolate mousse.  When I was a child my mother made an excellent mousse, but nowadays I wouldn't dare serve raw eggs to people.  The cake is made out of eggs, sugar, and cocoa, but the butter-free, flour-free vibe will be ruined once I've slavered it with cream and chocolate icing.  The chocolate icing is from a recipe I copied out of The Times years ago.  You melt dark chocolate with a high cocoa content and add warm double cream, and that's it.  The cake recipe is from Delia, but I tried her chocolate filling recipe once and it curdled, a complete waste of good chocolate.  I know that Delia has a particular place in the nation's affections, but I don't believe the temperatures she specifies for that cake filling.

I am not going to exercise my recently acquired skill with cheese straws, because I have absolutely run out of energy to cook any more food.  They'll just have to make do with fishy things on rye bread and posh crisps.  They'll get lots of dairy product in their puddings anyway.  I have done a table plan, on the basis that 'sit where you like' produces enough dithering even when there are only four of you, and that people would rather be told what to do.  It'll be fine.  Even if some things are a bit rough and ready, they are all too nice to mind too much about it.