I’m loving lockdown with a much younger man (but I really miss my cleaner)

There is much speculation about the long-term ramifications of Covid-19: will it end globalisation, increase state surveillance, cause isolationist policies?

But all I can think about at this moment, frankly, is: how do I get the shower screen smear-free, how tiny can I cut up my recycling to fit it in the box — and will I ever sit down again?

I know I’m not alone when I say I feel as if I’ve been transported back to the 1950s. I’d never realised before how relentless and back-breaking housework can be.

I’m white-knuckle terrified, too, about the end of the Easter holidays, after the brief insight I got into home-schooling before the term finished. I lost my mind trying to print worksheets, retrieve log-in details and cajole the littlest into doing a page of sums.

Their summer term officially starts today — so as you’re reading this, I will be taking a deep breath and channelling my inner housewife.

You see, my home is a rather busy one these days. There are five of us in here: me, my three children, aged 16, 11 and nine — and my partner of only a year, James Pritchett.

I made the decision that James should move in on the day lockdown was announced.

Anyone else who decided, as the shadow of coronavirus loomed, to take a fairly nascent relationship straight to the ‘sharing-a-home-with-three-kids-and-not-seeing-another-soul’ stage will know it’s a baptism of fire which puts a relationship into fast-forward.

Sometimes it feels as if we’re a couple of many years’ standing.

For me, it wasn’t a difficult decision — being a single mum is tough enough, but in isolation it would be an unimaginable test of parental stamina that would have been lonely and gruelling.

Plus, it was unthinkable that we wouldn’t see each other for several months.

If I was going to survive this period of confinement while running my antenatal classes — The Happy Birth Club online — writing newspaper features, appearing on the Jeremy Vine show and parenting three kids, and also manage to do things such as showering, dressing and eating, he would have to stay here the whole time.

He is handy in every imaginable way. As a 32-year-old he knows the difference between a PlayStation and an Xbox and can upload refreshed printer drivers (no, me neither) in a way that leaves me awed.

James has proved to be a life raft when I’m drowning in domestic drudgery, and an effective bouncer when I’m about to throw something at a recalcitrant computer (or child).

Because like any ‘holiday’ (ha!) with children, there are high highs and low lows.

Stress levels reached a new high as James tried to dye my grey roots in the garden. Neither of us had tried it before, but I was going on TV, so we set a ten-minute timer and began painting on the dye, at which point the kids chose to kick off an almighty row on the trampoline.

I actually started to weep — which saw James sprinting down the garden to tell the kids this was not a good time.

He sprinted back distressed and shirtless, but wearing plastic gloves and carrying a tube of hair colour. By the time he reached me he didn’t know if I was laughing or crying — it was, in fact, a bizarre combination of both, normally reserved for the very drunk, but all too common in lockdown.

James is also the giver of great hugs — and we both need those while separated from our wider families and friends.

My parents are isolating with my sister and her family, just around the corner from us in West London, while we do their food deliveries. Her house backs on to our local park, so they sit on the roof terrace and we chat to them loudly for ten minutes from below.

One more point in James’s favour: there is great merit in isolating with a property developer who has a full toolbox and a can-do attitude.

He and I have spent these past few weeks tackling all the household tasks that have been neglected for years: fence panels fixed, TV wires neatened; washing lines fitted; shelves replaced; doors rehung. We even fitted three wall lamps I bought five years ago that were sitting in the garage. DIY is not my forte, so I just stand back and watch the magic happen.

One shock success is our food stockpile. I had low hopes when James called me from the cash-and-carry to say that, besides porridge and tuna, he had got huge jars of garlic salt, mixed herbs and gherkins.

I told him that was typical of a bloody millennial. I was expecting dozens of half-baked baguettes and he’d bought garlic salt. I shamefully recall telling him this was the equivalent of a caveman going out for a woolly mammoth and returning with edible flowers.

However, I have eaten not only my words but also some delicious dinners, as it turns out that everything from tinned tomatoes to pizza and roast chicken is transformed by garlic salt and mixed herbs.

He did put the gherkins back on the shelf at my urging — and has reminded me of it every lunchtime, when he bites into a sandwich saying: ‘You know what this needs?’

But it hasn’t all been easy. In fact, at times, being so driven to be productive has pushed us nearly to mental breaking point.

Take the day we decided to clean the gutters. As I held the base of the 10ft ladder, James — from the top — shot a hose jet through the impacted moss. Then the children made themselves heard, shouting at each other about something.

I ended up yelling for the blasted kids to ‘please stop arguing for one minute!’ while dirty water rained on my head. These are the trench moments that will bond us for ever.

While it’s lovely having James here, there is someone I miss. I’ve had the same cleaner/babysitter/surrogate husband, Monika, for 15 years.

Of course, she is safely ensconced at home with her husband and dog at the moment. Every day I develop a renewed appreciation of her skills.

As a single mum (and even when I was married), I have to run a tight ship or the whole place capsizes. A messy house makes me feel overwhelmed and harassed — which is a curse during confinement because all I can see is a to-do list that is never done.

So as soon as lockdown was announced and we agreed that it was safer for Monika to stay at home, I looked around the house and dismally accepted that chaos would very soon descend.

I took her on a WhatsApp video-call tour of the house this week, showing her our DIY projects. She is missing the kids but I don’t think she missed the house when I showed her the laundry mountain I was about to tackle!

I also now know why she is in such great shape. I’ve lost 2lb this week (despite consuming highly calorific Provence rosé, crisps and houmous at 6pm) because I basically don’t sit down.

This is what our mothers’ generation knew — you really don’t need gyms when you are on your hands and knees, obsessively cleaning that grubby line where the kitchen floor meets the units.

I never wanted to get to know my dustbins so intimately. I’m reeling at the colossal amount of peelings and packaging produced by eating three meals a day, every day, at home. My glass recycling box creaks under the weight of the week’s empties.

There is an enormous sense of triumph when I win the Battle of the Recycling Box by cutting up my plastic waste into such small pieces that it actually all fits inside without pouring over the sides.

I may choose to take it outside at 8pm tonight and bask in the NHS applause as my own for excellent waste management.

Still, I find it oddly reassuring that Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez are in the same boat — making their kids pasta pesto and cleaning their own toilets for the first time in decades.

Perhaps even the Duchess of Cambridge is, like me, so irritated by the limescale build-up in her kettle that she has several litres of Kilrock descaler on order.

I have tried to enlist help from my children. After all, they are in the house 24/7, and no clean-up effort is going to work without their involvement.

So I recruited them onto the payroll, offering tiny amounts of money to finish a list of chores… which I then go around and do properly once they have finished.

I realise now that having help over the years has allowed me to earn money and have a social life, but it has also made the children complacent and lazy about tidiness. They had got used to having their rooms tided for them. No more.

The girls and I spent a satisfying morning cleaning out their wardrobes to fill several huge bags destined for their younger cousins. It was cathartic beyond belief.

All their school uniform was optimistically bagged up in the hope that they won’t go back before September — their hope, not mine, of course, although the truth is I much prefer having slow mornings in bed with the windows open and a cup of tea, rather than dashing out for the school drop-off.

Without the routine of a school day, however, I have all too often realised at 3pm that none of them has cleaned their teeth.

Still, we have finally tackled the youngest’s verrucas with nightly treatments, and their nails have never been so well-trimmed.

The playroom (otherwise known as the Pit of Hell) has been subject to a brutal culling process, which I think could only have been achieved with the fresh perspective that Covid lockdown imparts.

Several well-loved baby dolls have bitten the dust. Toys once earmarked ‘for the grandchildren’ are off to the charity shop, as such long-termism now seems arrogant and naive.

I have introduced the ‘box of doom’, into which anything left lying around gets flung. It’s then exiled to the garage.

At the end of the day, they must go to retrieve their own stuff and put it away.

It took a week to make this happen without wails of offended outrage, but now the habit has stuck. And it works.

Unexpectedly, instead of getting bored of each other, the children appear to have got ‘used’ to each other — and when they aren’t finding the tiniest reason to row, they get along rather well, with occasional lovely fits of giggles floating upstairs from the garden.

Of course, I have leverage. Threatening screen bans is the ultimate penalty in real life, but during lockdown it draws expressions of horror, as though I’d asked them to donate a kidney. And the middle child was so relentlessly gobby and unpleasant one day last week that instead of watching a film that evening, she had to tidy up the dinner plates and put away the laundry with me.

Sulkily, she did as she was told, and all three kids behaved much better for at least 48 hours.

Inflicting a 24-hour parental existence with three kids on an otherwise child-free 32-year-old man has, at times, felt cruel. He reminds me that I haven’t got a gun to his head and he can return to his own place at any time (someone find me a gun!).

We both know, though, that if he weren’t here it would be a thousand times harder every time a child asked me to connect one of their numerous devices to the wifi (again) while there is a pan on the stove, a wet wash to hang out, a teenager negotiating a reward to mow the lawn and a live Zoom-conferencing antenatal class to host.

My heart breaks for single parents dealing with this. We mums knew we couldn’t ‘have it all’ before lockdown, and during it that message hits home doubly hard.

But having a partner who willingly shares the burden by your side is a game-changer.

Take last Sunday, when we tackled the back of the garden, where a square of ten-year-old AstroTurf was covered in fox poo and the detritus of an enormous eucalyptus tree which sheds all year round.

Two little trampolines were lifted; the leaf-sucker fixed and deployed; rotten fence panels were sawn up; and two unused sun loungers were retrieved until, many hours later, James and I sat there, muscles aching and cheeks bronzed, gin and tonics in hand, enjoying the rustle of the breeze in the gum tree.

We were inordinately chuffed with our endeavours. The satisfaction was immense.

I can certainly see our future Sundays rolling out like this: a productive day’s gardening with (on a good day) the kids involved, rather than a lazy and expensive pub lunch.

If nothing else, having the house in order gives me a sense of control in an otherwise wildly uncontrollable situation.

In becoming a combination of Marie Kondo and Mrs Hinch, I am hoping to emerge from this decluttered, calmer, maybe thinner, and more in control of my house and, therefore, my life. I’m aiming high for the post-Covid world.

My liver may pickle under the strain but I have come to believe that my relationship will be stronger — and heaven knows, my storage solutions will definitely be hugely improved.