It’s a man’s world, but it’s nothing without hygiene

There was a line in Channels 4’s The State, a recent drama about British jihadists in Syria, which made me laugh, bitterly: “Everyone gets a house [in the Caliphate].” The later disillusioned Wembley-born jihadist (perhaps he thought he had joined NICE-IS?) did indeed receive a two-bedroom flat with ornamental courtyard. Everything is about the housing crisis these days. If you cannot buy a flat in London there are other options.

There is another effect too, brought to us by the anxious soothsayers of the housing crisis, estate agents: the bachelor pad is dead. If the fantasy of the bachelor pad – which was Austin Powers naked on shag pile carpet next to a round vibrating bed – never met the reality – which was Withnail’s kitchen sink – now men can afford neither. This is worth mourning, for now men will segue from the care of mother, via the care of university girlfriend, to the care of wife. Unless that wife is me.

I plucked my husband from a retirement bungalow in Wiltshire, where his ironing was done, and implanted him into a studio flat in north London, where his ironing was not done, unless he did it – which he did, with the kind of drama usually reserved for operating an amphibious landing craft in heavily defended enemy territory.

He will, in extremis, handle a broom, but only when he can hear an audible crunch as he walks across the floor. Without my intervention, we would be living in his now-theoretical bachelor pad, which looks like the inside of his head: Austin Powers’ flat, after the Apocalypse.

A whole generation of men will now never live alone. It is not the worst impact of the crisis – I reserve that for children growing up in fungal social housing or, worse, fungal temporary accommodation – yet still I think of these bachelor-pad-freemen as vulnerable creatures thrust into a world they do not have the skills to navigate: how will they learn to clean a lavatory? Dust a cornice? Sweep a floor? How will they protect themselves from the monsters that thrive in sheets washed below 60C and in the vegetable compartments of fridges? The relationship of the average man to housework (I ignore tidy men, for they are often controlling, and this is a different world of pain) is like the relationship of drug addict to drug; they must reach a nadir of filth to recover and have anything like a normal life. They cannot do this with the female as enabler and slave.

The solution, I think, is to refuse to do housework, and to remember that, though irritating, it is less destructive than man sharing with man. A single man recently asked his male flatmate to clean up because he had a date who might spend the night.

The flatmate interpreted this oddly, and promptly erected a shrine to Diana, Princess of Wales, in his friend’s bedroom.