We have a Polish cleaner. There, I’ve admitted it.
For a liberal, woolly-minded Old Labour person like me, that’s a big admission. Or, at least, it used to be. Now it’s perfectly normal to have ‘help around the house’, and to justify my actions I’d just say that if I didn’t employ her, she’d be out of work somewhere, living on bread and margarine. At least, from 1pm to 5pm on Wednesdays.
Poland’s entry into the European Union signalled a huge change-around in the British way of life. Once Irish builders had returned home and had been retrained in computer software design, our homes and roads began to fall apart. Then the East European miracle occurred. A whole breed of supermen appeared, who were prepared to work twice as hard as we Brits for half the money and who didn’t insist on filling our pubs with fiddle-playing, painted bohrans and pictures of Limerick ALA Teams of 1976.
At roughly the same time, the New British Mother was stirring. Egged on by Grrrl Power and post-feminist agitators such as Nadine Strossen, Carol J. Adams and Jeremy Kyle, she was began to think it unfair that she should be singlehandedly tasked with keeping the family home free of cobwebs and mildew. As the British male was too lazy and addled with football and cheap supermarket lager to help, family guidance clinics began to burst at the seams a good job we had the Polish builders around.
Luckily the Polish builders brought their wives and girlfriends with them. The better-looking ones became models and/ or worked in All Bar Ones, the rest who weren’t averse to getting their hands dirty and being horribly patronised for £6 an hour, became domestic sanitators.
Around this time, following a leaflet through the door and a meeting with the Major from Fawlty Towers, ominika appeared in our lives. How she and her like can clean away a whole week’s mess in three hours is beyond me. Just be grateful she can. We did attempt to recruit a traditional British Mrs Mop from the Isle of Dogs, but she wanted £45 a morning, two days a week, and insisted on being picked up and taken home by car or taxi every time. Frankly, out of our price-range (she didn’t like the look of me anyway, she told the friend who recommended her). A lucky break.
We now have a new Dominika – the old one is now pregnant and running a successful cleaning agency – called Kasha. We pay her a little more than the asking price, so as to salve my woolly-liberal, left-wing Old Labour conscience, but that’s a small price to pay for being able to sleep smugly at nights. And an even smaller price to pay for getting your hob polished.
There’s an issue about Kasha’s reluctance to abandon the nuclear-powered cleaning products for Green-friendly detergents that probably make her job twice as difficult, but we are currently working hard to resolve that. A small price to pay for…
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Ho. Ho. Ho.