Neat FREAK

IT’S TESTING TIMES WHEN THE YOUNGEST DAUGHTER RETURNS

Living in an apartment makes you tidier. There’s just not the space in the place for leaving stuff lying around. Even my wife, who is wonderful in every way but untidy by nature, has become a more orderly person, though

I’m sure that will pass once we’re back in our great big house in just a few weeks.

The other thing that makes us tidier living temporarily in a friend’s flash Auckland apartment is that the place came with a cleaner attached. Her name is Shirley and she comes by first thing every Wednesday morning. She’s extremely efficient and a lovely woman to boot, though I haven’t seen much of her.

I generally bail out when she’s here and I certainly make sure things aren’t too much of a mess before she arrives. So we’re living a tidier life. We even managed to remain tidier than usual when the youngest daughter moved back in with us for a few weeks.

She’s 18 and she left the old home with us in Wellington at the start of the year, moving to Auckland for a more glamorous life without parents cluttering up things. But then when we moved up here to the temporary Auckland apartment and she found herself between places for a little while, she moved back in with us.

And if your last daughter leaving home isn’t bad enough, it’s possibly worse when she moves back in and then she moves out again, though the truth is it’s probably a good thing she went.

I noticed she’d started reverting to being a teenager again, putting our new life of peace and tidiness under increasing threat. She was great at first, like a charming, grown-up version of her slightly younger self. But she started reverting and then she went and moved out anyway.

And I felt sad, of course, being a soft-hearted sort of father, though not so soft-hearted that I wasn’t slightly pleased to see her go and get on with that next bit of her life again. Now we catch up for coffees and she comes by once a week or so with her washing.

There’s no washing machine at the daughter’s flat, and she and her flatmates aren’t drawn to the idea of investing in one, no matter how much I suggest what a good idea that might be. But I do quite like it when she falls in our door under the weight of her washing.

We’re back to being pleased to see each other and maybe even wanting more, which is just as well. Things might have gone bad if she’d stayed too long.

Living in this apartment has turned me into a bit of a barn chicken and I have trouble adjusting to company, apart from the beloved wife, of course, though she’s often absent.

And, anyway, soon we’ll be off, back to Wellington, reunited with my much-missed cat and the sprawling, back-breaking garden and lawns. I’ll also be back to doing the house cleaning, which is the bit I’m really not looking forward to.

Because things might just get a little untidy again.