Don't get me wrong but...

By and large my house is very low-maintenance.

It’s on one level, so no stairs – I used to hate cleaning stairs! You can’t get a real rhythm going with stairs, plus there are so many corners.

Your average room has 4 corners, but stairs have 2 corners per rise, which with an average number of 13 steps per stairway equals 26 corners. It also means lugging the vacuum up 13 steps. Or down, which is not much better.

Of course if you have no pets then it is possible to use one of those vacuum-on-a-stick devices. In my experience they are useless on carpeted surfaces, because they do not, no matter what the man with the terminally boring voice says, pick up ‘embedded pet hair.’ The only way to pick up embedded hair is to use a vacuum with some serious grunt – possibly even then you might have to deploy an occasional thumbnail!

But my house, apart from the winter, when it has a rug on the living room floor, is wall-to-wall tiles. So a pan and brush, with intermittent mopping, is sufficient. Again the pet-less person only has to contend with dust and garden detritus, but those of us with cats and/or dogs will have a comprehensive knowledge of fluff in all its many forms.

I feel I could write an in-depth dissertation on the subject of fluff. Fluff comes in two forms – dog hair and cat hair. Both are completely different, and each presents the fluff sweeper with a different challenge. Dog hair is more plentiful, and more easily swept up. Apart from the embedding factor, which is a whole separate issue, dog hair stays where it fell and is amenable to being swept up – it doesn’t fight back, it succumbs to the brush, and stays put in the pan.

There is, however, one mystery regarding dog hair that I am at a loss to understand. Why is it that whatever colour dog you have, the hair it sheds is always a different colour to any surface it falls on? A light coloured dog will shed dark hair on light coloured surfaces, and vice versa.

Dog hair can be mastered – but cat hair? Like its original host cat hair is not governable. It hides behind and under everything, and when rooted out will waft away like a wraith at a séance.

Pet hair, when caught, due to persistent chasing with the brush, will innocently nestle in the pan, but as soon as you move it will waft out again, usually behind you!
So whereas there might be less of it, it takes twice as much effort to sweep up! And then there is the matter of the dead or semi-dead small wildlife that the cat will bring in for storage – usually under or behind any large and difficult to move item of furniture!

Housework is the one aspect of the Queen’s life that I envy – she doesn’t have to do it!