I don't know what your house is like these days, but in mine we're knee-deep in wipes. Tubes of wipes. Rolls of wipes. Peel-n-reseal plastic envelopes of wipes. Few tasks can be undertaken without opening a receptacle of pre-moistened tissues, whose range of applications makes me wish I had put Hygiene Studies above Journalism on my CAO form. I'd be rich now, writes Conor Goodman.
It started, last year, with baby wipes - which, along with soothers, I once swore would never cross the threshold - and 19 months on, "wipe" and "dodie" are principal words in my daughter's tiny vocabulary.
From baby wipes, it was a swift, slippery slope into sloth. We were on harder stuff before we noticed it. Surface-sterilising wipes. Deodorising wipes. Stain-removal wipes. Keyboard wipes. Window-cleaning wipes. Sunscreen wipes. Self-tan wipes. After-sex wipes (No such thing. Just trying to hold your attention. And, incidentally, I have been asked to make clear that we have never bought, or used, fake-tan wipes.). Hair removal wipes? I wrote these down as a joke, but my wife assures me they exist. No more shaving? Just wipe off your beard. Goodbye, ZZ-Top. Take that, Taliban.
If your household hasn't yet succumbed, prepare. The wipes are coming. Perfume and aftershave wipes. Hair-styling wipes. Shiny-coat wipes for your pet. And the spin-off products are with us already. Duzzums find da wipesies too cold? Get a wipe-warmer, and bring the damp tissue to body temperature before it makes contact with the pampered posterior. I would scoff at this device, but have learned to keep quiet when there is a possibility I might soon own one. After all, it was just two short years ago that I pooh-poohed the whole notion of disposable wipes.
So many of these products are obviously aimed at women, one could be forgiven for thinking that wipe worship is a female phenomenon. Think again. Change the marketing (Biker wipes. Powerful! Strong! Heavy-duty!) and men will queue up to buy the same products. Three months ago in a DIY store, I spotted painters' and decorators' wipes. In robust, black-and-yellow packaging, they were so masculine they almost belched in public. But, like all wipes, they cost twice as much and last half as long as the products they are intended to supersede: in this case, turps and a cloth. I bought them, of course.
Time was, to purchase a box of Mansize tissues was the height of indulgence. My mother used to buy them and cut them in two. This was just sensible home economics. Fast-forward a couple of decades, and in my home it's one sheet of kitchen roll per spot of spilt milk.
Have I gone soft in the head? Well, maybe not. Baby wipes are a genuine labour-saving commodity. I mean, who wouldn't pay a few bob to save themselves filling a basin with water, transporting it to nappy-changing location, saturating toilet roll in it, using this disintegrating mass to clean your child, who then thanklessly upturns the basin, you slip in the resulting puddle, drop the baby, shout "yes everything's fine", and then mop it all up and pretend nothing happened ... when they could just buy some wipes. It seems to make sense.
But are they worth it? A €7.62 double-pack lasts about a week, which comes to ... chug, whirr, give up and use calculator ... €400 a year. What? For a bit of mopping and a couple of bumps on your baby's head? Call in the accountants. Sack the CEO.
No, we seem to find ourselves in the midst of an unstoppable riot of disposability and convenience. Cosseted by Firelogs and par-cooked pasta packs, we are living in an over-opulent, terminally-ill society. I have a vision of the end-of-empire Romans popping papyrus wipes into hot brick wipe-warmers, having long ago forgotten how to fling spears at the Goths swarming around the city.
And if our society is in decline, what about humankind as a whole? Worried about this, I recently undertook a study of Darwin's Theory of Evolution (two minutes ago; cheers Google), and a scan of his more comprehensible work leads me to conclude that the human race is to be wiped out by one of its own ingenious inventions. Yes, we have reduced our species to mere bystanders in the evolution of the cleaning textile.
One hundred years ago, toilet roll was found only in the homes of the rich. Nowadays, we in the Western world aren't happy with anything less than hi-tech, huggably softer bouncy-roll. In another 20 years, the current generation of infants will have grown up and will be using nothing but "Flushable Moist Wipes with Aloe".
I'll skip the heavy science (it's Saturday, after all) but on this trajectory, I estimate that in just one million years we could have wipes instead of hands. It's not a cheerful outlook. I think I'm going to cry. Pass me a No-Weep Wipe, darling.