The daily drudgery:

ELEANOR ROBERTSON RANKS HOUSEHOLD CHORES FROM SUCKY TO SUCKIEST.

Household chores ranked from sucky to suckiest

The worst thing about housework is that it’s never finished. No matter how much hair you pull out of the shower drain, the demonic forces of entropy will always conspire to replace cleanliness with filth. Certain tasks are more soul-destroying than others, though, so here is my ranking, from least to most horrible, of the inescapable hell that is household chores.

COOKING I know some people who would rather chip bunions off the feet of an angry rhino than make dinner. They are baffling to me. Cooking is the perfect chore: it’s only as hard as you make it, and at the end you get to eat some food. The reason I include it here is because you have to clean up after you cook. No one wants to scrape dried-up carrot peels off the kitchen bench when they could be lying on the couch digesting.

LAUNDRY With a trusty front-loader, a podcast, and a healthy aversion to ironing, laundry can be very relaxing. It’s a great time to be rigid and controlling without pissing people off – if my undies aren’t hanging symmetrically, I’ll adjust them until my internal bureaucrat is fully satisfied. However, laundry rewards consistency. One load is fine, but if I’m staring at a dirty washing pile the size of a hatchback, I become tempted to feed it into a woodchipper and live the rest of my life in the nude.

VACUUMING Man, fuck vacuuming. What even is dust? Some people say it’s mostly made up of human skin, but I think that’s a convenient fairy story to cover up the true origin of dust: evil. Evil forces reaching into our dimension from other worlds cause dust, and I won’t hear a word to the contrary. On top of this, you have to suck up the dust with an incredibly loud, cumbersome machine? And then you have to empty the dust into the bin, which always results in a mushroom cloud of particulate filth up your nose? No, thank you. Vacuuming is cancelled.

TAKING THE BINS OUT The only way to make taking out the rubbish tolerable is to force someone else to do it. In an ideal world, rubbish would disappear as soon as it was created. On this crap Earth, we stuff it into a bin so it can sit there for a few days fermenting and excreting all kinds of horrific liquids. Then you have to pick it up and take it out – a task that carries a 100 per cent risk of getting bin juice on your bare hands. Garbage men should be paid a million dollars a year.

WASHING UP The day I moved into an apartment with a dishwasher was the best day of my life. I’d rather pull all my pubes out individually with a pair of tweezers than do the washing up. I’d rather eat a handful of live wasps. If I never have to chip hard scrambled eggs off a greasy plate again, I will die happy. If washing up suddenly disappeared, every sharehouse on Earth would become 40 per cent more pleasant. We should just eat off the floor and be done with it.

CLEANING THE CAT LITTER Is there anything worse than scooping up the turds of an animal with a brain the size of a walnut? Well, yes, there is: scraping that animal’s turds off the wall because they can’t aim their butthole at a toilet twice the size of their body. If human toilets had the same relative dimensions as litter trays, they’d be the size of paddling pools. Yet somehow, at least once a week, my cat hangs her stupid cat bum off the side of the tray and drops a log on the goddamn floor. She’s lucky she’s so cute, is all I have to say.