The slovenly side effects of start up

It was a shaft of spring sunlight that nearly caused my own wee waterworks to start sprinkling this week.

Admittedly, I was a bit broken after a few days of particularly tough graft and nowhere near sufficient shut-eye. I had a horrid headache and burny eyes, a queasy tummy and a wee bit of the wobbles. My senses of humour and proportion were well and truly lost, and I was lurking around in the limp rag school of small business.

But I wasn’t ill, or even totally down-heartened, just good old fashioned cream crackered.

But even in the midst of the crash and burn I felt a strong sense of satisfaction about a week’s work well done. There’s a cracking new contract on the cards, the sniff of something really special on the client front, and a troupe of trainees tripped off brimful with new skills and invigoration thanks to yours true.

And I knew that this short spell of dog-tiredness would ease up in a weekend featuring no enervating early rises, and a Maw’s Day lunch with the Word Up Wean in the culinary hotspot that is the University Cafe.

But lordy, sometimes it’s hard. Hard to keep going when you’re totally and utterly done in and dead beat. Hard when the very thought of writing the shopping list, making the tea or cleaning the lavvy threatens a full-scale slump or a sobbing fit. Hard when you cannot for the life of you work out when exactly you’re going to cut the grass, visit your gran, or paint the living room.

So, as they say, something’s gotta give. And since setting off in small business, the give for me has been dusting, bleaching, buffing and scrubbing.

Look, I never was a Kim or Aggie, life’s too damn short for cleaning behind the cooker or polishing the picture rail, but I always did kinda like a tidy house.  In my previous existence, somehow or other I did manage to make time to be spick and more or less span. But not no more.

Keeping on top of keeping house has slipped way, way down the priority list, and half-hearted swabs with a duster or damp cloth don’t do much for this manky midden.

It’s not that I want to set such slatternly standards, I don’t actually like living in a house shrouded in a fine layer of dust, debris and unidentifiable bacterial lifeforms. But since going into commerce, I cannot find the time to tackle my life of grime, let alone the will or the energy.

But find it I must. Cos, gonnae no laugh, seeing the slovenly, sticky state of the kitchen captured in all its greasy glory in the spring sunlight this week was a hygiene horror story. I was nearly greetin’ as I surveyed the sordid scene – it gave a whole new meaning to down and dirty…

But bugger it – me, my Marigolds, Mr Muscle and the paid help (aka the Word Up Wean) will get tore in tomorrow, then it’s right back to business as usual.