After my Christmas cleaning, I cracked open a bottle of red and worked through a box of memories

IT was 8pm when I finished and I was exhausted. Tuesday was the day I dread all year, the day of the Christmas Clean, and I thought I’d be done and – literally – dusted by six at the latest. Instead, as the Angelus bells rang on RTÉ, I was looking down from the dizzying height of an eight-step ladder, holding on for dear life with one hand and destroying an entire spider ecosystem with the other.

I live in a single-storey house in north Wexford and the main room serves multiple functions, as kitchen, dining and living space. In fact, this open-plan arrangement was what sold me on the house in the first place, especially since the ceiling over the living area rises to the full height of the roof, which is 6.4 metres, or 21 feet in old money.

All this proves is that you never should buy a house on a June bank holiday weekend. It was warm and sunny outside that day, the house all shiny and new, and I plonked down the deposit on the spot (this was 2004, when the slightest prevarication would see someone else kick the legs from under you and shower tenners down on the estate agent).

In the years since, the space has proved a mixed blessing. Not only is it hard to heat in winter – if I arrive home after a weekend in Dublin, it can take a full 24 hours for the thermostat to hit 21 degrees – it also pretty much is the perfect breeding ground for spiders. Oh, how they love it up there in their own little stratosphere, far beyond my reach.

Eventually, I found an extendable brush in the Betterware catalogue, but it still doesn’t reach the apex, which is where the stepladder comes in.

Slashing my way through what looked like Miss Havisham’s house in Great Expectations proved an oddly cathartic counterpoint to the terror of wobbling on top of the ladder and, in any case, I was possessed of the zeal only a deep clean of the house seems to engender.

Is there anything quite like the satisfaction you get from cleaning? I don’t mean daily sweeping and stacking the dishwasher and going mad with Domestos, but the concerted act of attacking the jobs you’ve put off – and with military precision.

Of course, every army needs weapons and mine come in the form of gadgets that allegedly make all this cleaning easier. I have a steam mop with a detachable, handheld steam cleaner that, on the TV infomercial I watched one morning at 2am, promised it would strip the hide from a buffalo.

I have a rechargeable swivelling brush, with interchangeable heads of different sizes and shapes, that allegedly take the effort out of scrubbing in all those difficult corners, and another electric floor polisher with circular pads.

Every floor in my house is either tile or wood, but oh, how I wish I had bought carpet. Carpet hides the sins tile and wood shout with a megaphone, even more so when the tiles are not ceramic smooth but ridged and etched with deep grooves that covet mud and dust.

Scrubbing

That’s why, even after a double mopping, I still found myself on my hands and knees (and I give much thanks for the €1.50 foam kneeler I bought years ago and which has long since repaid every cent a thousand fold) with a scrubbing brush and a toothbrush, trying to dislodge some of the detritus that’s probably still there since last year’s Christmas Clean.

As for the steam cleaner, well, on the TV ad it literally vaporises soap scum and limescale on the shower glass, but in real life gives it the sort of wan lick you’d get from a shy puppy. I live in a hard water area and the limescale often is so bad, I use only bottled water in the kettle and coffee machine, but I have no such luxury in the shower.

Indeed, I bought a new showerhead that has beads of calcium sulphite and germanium (no, me neither, but it sounded impressive) that allegedly ionise and soften the water.

It didn’t feel much like it when I abandoned the steamer completely and ended up attacking the shower with a combination of Cillit Bang Lime and Grime, Cif, and the rotating brush head on full power, still to little real avail.

Half-way through the day, I stumbled across a cardboard box and the distraction proved irresistible. I found old photos, and a pair of expensive Bang & Oluf- sen headphones I thought I had lost, and two phone-charging cables that will come in handy, and travel-size shampoos and shaving foams, and other bits and bobs that somehow set me back a full two hours behind schedule.

All the while, I managed to get through four loads of washing, mostly sheets and towels that already were clean in the hot press but needed refreshing for when some of the family come to stay over the holidays. The last cycle consisted solely of the wretched pads from the steam mop and the polisher, adding another tier of nuisance to what allegedly is convenience.

Then it was time to Brillo the stainless steel sink in the kitchen and the chance to muse on the wilful deceit of whoever named it ‘stainless’ on the first place.

From there, I moved on to the bathrooms, attacking the sinks with my own weight in Cif (though it always will be Jif to me) and a smaller head on the rotating brush – though yet again, the only way to get into the crevices around the taps is with an old toothbrush and lots of gumption. And because I was on a roll, I then polished all the sinks and taps with Windolene, in the vain hope that it would form some sort of protective shield that would last for about six months.

Then calamity struck. I found another box of rubbish that contained old Christmas cards from my childhood and a stray fiver (sadly punts, not euro) and suddenly it was dark and I remembered the cobwebs. That’s a job that really would have been best addressed in daylight hours, because when I woke on Wednesday morning, I either had missed quite a few large ones or the spiders had a wee chat and decided on swift and brutal revenge.

There is, I understand, concern in medical circles about what is known as ‘reward drinking’, that feeling you get when you complete a task and believe you ‘deserve’ a glass of wine. Well, tough, doc.

At 8pm, I cracked open a bottle of Portuguese red and drank the lot as I worked through another box of memories that made all the effort worthwhile.

It was only when I headed to bed that I remembered that I had stripped it first thing but hadn’t remade it. Is there anything worse than trying to fit a duvet cover after a bottle of wine? I ended up crawling into what looked like a cotton sarcophagus, but I didn’t care.

The house was tidy. More to the point, it was spotlessly clean and I’d managed to sort out the junk room too.

Well, I say that, but I simply had moved it from one room to another. It’ll go back next Christmas, I’m sure.

Somewhere close by, though, I’m sure a spider giggled.

I won this battle. The war continues.