There were four of us in the pub last Sunday, having a soothing pint and comparing Cluedo-like notes on a party the previous night - who did what with whom and where. Gradually as the pints settled, so did the sorry realisation that it was the start of another working week and, therefore, another five whole days before the weekend came round again.
After a long and gloomy silence we started to try and summon up some remedies for the blues. St John's Wort, retail therapy and another round of pints were all mentioned before one friend chimed in with a one-word ambush: Housework!
My, how we laughed. But it turned out she was deadly serious. It seems that all of New York is talking about the latest coffee-table book to hit the best-seller lists in the US, Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House. Don't be blinded by the word science in the title, this is a Mrs Beeton for the 1990s, a manual that tells you how to look after your house, store food, remove stains and quite possibly, jug a hare. Americans can't get enough of it.
What sets Home Comforts apart from the other helpful hints books that languish in large piles in bargain bookshops are two startling facts. The first is that author Cheryl Mendelson is no earthy homebody but rather a very smart and successful New York lawyer and philosopher. The second is that the woman actually loves housework and is encouraging everybody to start worshipping at the shrine of cleanliness and order.
My immediate reaction was one of horror. For me, housework is something to be fitted in around work, partying, seeing my family and friends, reading, travelling and saving several species of ant from extinction. That is, I usually tidy my flat on a Tuesday when there's an X in the month. I'm not naturally tidy. In fact, I would hazard a guess that I'm very unnaturally untidy.
My bedroom is a maelstrom of clothes, make-up, books and random articles that never seem able to account for their presence - a colander turned up recently and a chrome door stop was once spotted hanging around near the clothes rack. Try as I might, I just can't manage to put things away in their proper place - on my way to the wardrobe with a folded shirt I will suddenly spot a pile of photos and quite literally drop the shirt and pick up the photos. It's like living with a toddler, except the toddler is me.
Dirt, on the other hand, I don't like. So, there are often sudden putschs when I come over all butch with Jif and scrubbing brushes and enough hot water to deliver several babies. Unfortunately, these moments very rarely coincide with what could generally be considered a good time to clean a house, like a weekend or the early evening.
Instead I always seem to get a fit of hygiene very late at night when I have a 9 a.m. appointment or 10 minutes before I'm due to go on holidays.
So, when I heard about Mendelson's book, I got a little bit gloomy. Here was another thing I was doing wrong and another thing to worry about late at night. Not only was I not tidying my flat but it now appears, I'm also cutting myself off from a vital form of therapy.
Mendelson has said, "if you want to stay sane and whole, then you have to have a part of your life in which you're at the centre, and that's supposed to be your home." The woman is a successful lawyer and academic, has a clean house, makes her own pasta and is not just sane, but whole too - how intimidating is that?
Superwomen have been around since Shirley Conran coined the phrase in the 1960s and they always fill me with a mixture of awe and fury. Of course, I'd love to have both a storming career and family life like Nicola Horlicks or stun my friends with a unique centrepiece like Martha Stewart, but I just don't have the time.
When I do have the time, the last thing I want to do is whizz around getting creative with a duster. No matter that the household tips in these books are often dressed up as labour-saving or time-cutting devices, the simple fact is that not doing them at all is the biggest time-saving device of all.
So, I just never do organised things such as freezing large batches of soup, turning my mattress (Mendelson is a big fan of mattress-turning) or defrosting my fridge before it threatens to get up and walk out. I continue to live in what resembles a material illustration of the random chaos theory.
Truth be told, however, I can see the sense of what Cheryl Mendelson says - what with not being able to find clean clothes, tripping over bags of unpacked shopping and constantly hunting for my toothpaste/remote-control/flatmate, the chaos I live in often threatens to overwhelm me. I'm always aware of my flat hovering like a guilty conscience, murmuring "tidy me, sort me, love me" - and, although I usually ignore it, the voice never quite goes away.
When I do get around to tidying my flat, which I do in large and histrionic fashion at very random times, I not only enjoy the therapeutic side of restoring order and getting rid of mess and dirt, but I'm also calmer and more relaxed until the mess builds up again.
As I survey my gleaming shower and my neatly stacked piles of jumpers, I can understand Cheryl Mendelson's appreciation of housework as an art. There's undoubtedly a craft to cleaning and it's understandable that those who enjoy it and spend time on it want a kind of recognition from the rest of us.
The problem is that there are few other art forms that have such an intimate relationship with guilt. If Mendelson had written a paean of praise to the calming art of origami or pig husbandry or mosaics, it wouldn't have upset me in the slightest. But there is still a pressure to have it all - even before kids come along we are meant to have gorgeous lifestyles, thriving careers and active social lives.
For those of us who always seem to be trying to catch up with one at the expense of the other, books such as Home Com- forts are always going to be less like a home help and more like the traditional nagging mother-in-law - "Is your grouting meant to be that colour, dear? I'll tell you what you want to do . . ."