Ingenious tricks from Queen of Clean to make YOUR home sparkle
Lynsey Crombie is the social media sensation and TV star who’s spearheading Britain’s peculiar love affair with housework. Cleanaholic SARAH VINE celebrates...
In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different. COCO CHANEL
Whenever I’m tired or depressed or strung out, I clean. Depending on the severity of the situation, it can be anything from a straightforward fridge audit (throwing away ancient jars of gherkins, disinfecting the lettuce crisper, tidying up the cheese), or a bit of gentle descaling (showerheads are my favourite, soooo satisfying) to a full-blown, house-wide dirt offensive.
Once I get stuck in, I find it hard to stop. I have been known to rearrange the entire house while my husband and children are at work and school. And it doesn’t stop at cupboards either.
Shifting furniture is my favourite. It’s not unusual for the children to come home to discover the sofa somewhere else entirely and the fridge where the Tv used to be. They just roll their eyes
and sigh. Mum’s having ‘one of her days’. As an anxious child who was bullied at school, I remember vividly doing the same to my bedroom, often in the wee small hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep.
Although I didn’t realise it at the time, imposing order after a day of being imposed upon somehow gave me the mental capacity to face the world again. Cleaning — together with tidying, sorting, purging — became, and remains, a kind of meditation for me.
Which is why I have no trouble understanding the current ‘cleanspiration’ craze on social media.
What began with Japanese tidying guru Marie Kondo — who now has her own Netflix series, taking on some truly mighty messes and ‘sparking joy’ with her gentle but determined methods — has mushroomed into a full-blown phenomenon.
It’s a largely female-driven trend (the majority of followers are women, which is hardly surprising since we still do 60 per cent more housework than men), spearheaded by ‘cleanstagrammers’ such as Lynsey Crombie — aka ‘ the queen of clean’.
The 40-year- old mum- of-three from Peterborough tends to favour a more homely, down-to- earth approach than Kondo — not to mention a lot of pink.
Her blog is packed with inspirational cleaning quotes and practical suggestions, as well as enthusiastic endorsements for cleaning products. (She recently introduced me to a product that dissolves pet hair in the washing machine, something that, as the owner of three dogs, has improved my life immeasurably.)
She has turned her penchant for polishing into a successful media career, running her own cleaning company and appearing on Channel 4’s Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners. Her new book How To Clean Your House is published this week and there are offers on the table for another TV series and a range of cleaning products.
Meanwhile, Sophie Hinchcliffe — aka ‘Mrs Hinch’— a 28-year-old hairdresser from Essex, has more than two million followers on Instagram (me included), all of us drawn to her stylish, sparkling interior shots of her monochrome home.
THEN
there’s Gemma Bray, ‘the organised mum’ ( 143,000 followers), Melissa Maker (from Toronto), whose Clean My Space YouTube channel has more than a million subscribers and Becky Rapinchuk (from Chicago), aka Clean Mama (312,000 followers on Instagram).
Everywhere you look, cleaning gurus are popping out of the woodwork, brandishing their sponsored mops and extolling the virtues of mould removal. Because it’s big business, too. When Lynsey mentioned Swan floor products in a series of Instagram posts earlier this year, sales spiked by 33 per cent. While Mrs Hinch once raved about a £1 M&S sponge and sales jumped by 100 per cent.
So what exactly is going on here? After all, it does seem rather odd that women, having fought tooth and nail to unchain themselves from the kitchen sink, should suddenly be finding new meaning in de-furring the kettle or polishing the oven door. Why is cleaning suddenly so cool?
Have we come this far simply to revert to the 21st-century equivalent of a Fifties advertising campaign, an army of pinafore- wearing Stepford wives unable to rest until every last speck of dust has been Pledged to oblivion?
No. Because this time there is a crucial difference. It’s a choice. It’s precisely because women are no longer slaves to domesticity that we can, if we want, start to reclaim that space as our own.
This cleaning craze is no different to cultural obsessions with baking cakes, home-cooking, sewing. They are all ways of fetishising the domestic, expressions of a nostalgia for a simple, more straightforward, more wholesome time.
Of course, there was a good reason our mothers and grandmothers rebelled against the tyranny of housework.
It’s hard, relentless, never-ending and often thankless. You do it all, only to have to do it all again the next day.
It kept women at a level of domestic servitude, unable to achieve anything much beyond the four walls of their home, defined not by their intellect or their contributions to wider society, but by their capacity to act as a selfeffacing support system for their families, doing the jobs no one else wants to do.
That, at least, is the feminist theory, and I don’t entirely disagree. I could never be a full-time housewife, it would drive me insane.
But I do also think there is a part of every woman that sees dominating the domestic sphere, not so much as a surrender, as a source of pride and, dare I say it, joy.
And so, just as domestic skills such as baking and sewing have slowly but surely been re-cast as lifestyle choices, avenues to personal fulfilment, so that most unloved of chores, cleaning, is being re-framed not as drudgery, but as a way of reconnecting with what’s tangible and achievable.
This feels more than usually necessary given the times we live in. The past two years have been a roller coaster of political uncertainty; young people are killing each other with knives; climate change looms; the hate mobs rage. There is a kind of refuge in focusing on the banal task of cleaning, a peace in knowing that, if all else fails, at least no one can accuse you of having a clogged plughole.
There’s something else, too, something that so many of the cleaning gurus share: the notion of cleaning as a path to mental health and long-term happiness.
Indeed, that is how many of them came to it.
In the case of Lynsey Crombie, it was a way of taking back control of her life when she went into premature labour with twins after a traumatic and sudden marriage breakdown.
Her husband, it transpired, harboured a dirty secret, which, quite literally, sent Lynsey into ‘cleaning overdrive’.
‘The need to scrub away at my skin and my home [was] the only way I could deal with the situation and wash away the badness,’ she writes. ‘My daily walk would be to the local shops to buy cleaning products.
‘Then I would come home and obsessively clean until all the products were gone. It wasn’t normal behaviour, but it was something I could channel my anger and negative energy into.’
I can’t tell you how much these notions resonate. When I’m stressed out, getting my domestic environment shipshape is the one
thing guaranteed to make me feel I’m back on top of things. The more frenetic my life feels, the tighter I seek to exercise my grip over the domestic. The scale of the cleaning task reflects the level of psychosis. Last Sunday, for example, I was really stressed out. Properly at the end of my tether. I know this because in my deranged state, I decided to take on my cleaning nemesis: my teenage daughter’s bedroom. Within minutes I realised I had made a terrible mistake. What I had thought would take maybe an hour-and-a-half, two tops, became a never-ending marathon in which the finish line seemed to be receding. The more I cleaned, the more dirt I seemed to find, from sweet-wrappers, bits of tissue, blobs of glue, dried- out pens, dirty hairbrushes, make-up spills, tangles of chargers lurking in corners like killer octopuses.
It was when I sat down on a Jelly Tot that attached itself to my nice new Zara trousers that I lost it. I threw the mass of cables across the room. It felt good. So I threw a bag of old shoes into the corridor.
Then, I decided to chuck the whole lot down the stairs, followed by boxes containing old exercise books and ancient toys, then a small piece of furniture. That last one took my back out. Not much to gain inspiration from there, I think you’ll agree.
Indeed, I’m pretty sure this is not the kind of behaviour Lynsey had in mind when she wrote her mission statement to ‘help you make your palace shine, keep you organised and on top of your housework in a fun, constructive way’.
Nothing constructive about throwing your daughter’s stuff down the stairs. Fun, though. Even so, I found it revealing. Afterwards, as I was tidying the debris from my outburst, I thought about why, of all the rooms I could have targeted, I chose my daughter’s. And I realised it probably had a lot to do with the fact that, at 15, she is gradually pulling away from me, asserting her own character, becoming her own person.
Subconsciously, I think, my desire to impose order on her environment reflects my own desire to reclaim my little girl. The fact I failed is probably telling.
Ultimately, we all seek ways to alleviate the pressure in our lives.
Obsessive cleaning may not always be entirely rational; but there are worse ways of exorcising one’s demons. Lynsey and her like may seem like a weird bunch to some. But to those of us who understand the healing power of cleaning, they are sisters in suds.