Untidiness is next to Godliness!

According to a new survey - one I cannot actually read out loud without hooting with disbelief - those of us who live in untidy homes are actually worse human beings than clean people.
 

By 'clean' they presumably mean all those scary neat freaks who do the following: carry wet wipes that could strip paint off a battleship in their bags in case they come into contact with any nasty, dirty people. Insist on guests removing shoes before entering their hygienic home. Or hover anxiously over toast-chomping teens and equally crumb-blind males with damp cloth or dustbuster, waiting to wipe or suction any evidence of eating, drinking or making merry as it occurs.
 

Research slams scruffs
Surprised? Well, if you don't believe me, allow me to quote from this latest piece of research from the University of Nutters (ie the Brigham Young University, Utah) in full.
 

From a research paper called The Smell Of Virtue, it says that those who live in clean fragranced houses are more moral than messy people. They claim fresh aromas make people unconsciously fairer. Apparently, research found a dramatic improvement in ethical behaviour with a few sprays of lemon-scented cleaner.
 

I don't mind people calling me or anyone else with untidy houses slobs, because it's fair comment (although, to me, my houses are, I insist, actually quite clean).
 

But I do mind being told that my scruffiness makes me a bad person. To me, my houses are as clean as they should be - or, put another way, they are as untidy as I can bear. I have an untidy husband who cannot see a nice clean duvet cover without laying his outdoor shoes on it, a dog that leaves burrs of fur on every surface, and three teenagers. Like any working mother, I find that maintaining gleaming surfaces a Sisyphean chore on the Forth Bridge scale, and so I hire a cleaner.
 

Even so, I am often congratulated by friends on my admirable tolerance for mess - the same friends who do not allow any clutter at all and keep their cashmere jumpers in plastic sealed bags.
 

'I love your house,' my pals enthuse as they struggle to find any bare surface to put down their drinks or mugs. 'It's such a home!' - by which, of course, they mean 'tip' or 'bordello'. My mother is fanatically tidy, so I must have inherited my tolerance for mess from my father, who had the ability to turn a room upside down within seconds of entering it.
 

Spotless equals bonkers!
But this doesn't make me, him, or any other domestic slattern immoral: rather the reverse. There's nothing more spooky and suggestive of an unclean mind than a spotless house.
 

Think of Lady Macbeth, who scrubbed and scrubbed at the vile spot. Think of American domestic goddess Martha Stewart, imprisoned for corporate fraud, who colour codes everything from her socks to her frying pans, and who only allows red and black pens in the office. Remember fallen banker Bernie Madoff, who didn't allow clutter on the desks in his office, and ordered everything in black to hide any speck of dirt. Not to forget Desperate Housewives' Bree, whose neuroses mask a seething mass of turmoil underneath.
 

I would love my house to be in apple-pie order, too, and to be able to open a drawer and find something rather than a scrimmage of random objects, tied up with string.
 

I admit, when my husband called me to tell me someone had burgled his study, I responded: 'How can you tell?'
 

But still. We all know life is too short to stuff a mushroom, so there is no way am I going to spend my mayfly moment tidying up other people's mess. Anyway, as the raconteur Quentin Crisp once said: 'After the first four years, the dust doesn't get any worse.'