How to clean your house.

In my experience, people like to tell you they're obsessive cleaners, but, invariably, they aren't.

Take my friend Jen, who always says it self-deprecatingly, as though it were something to be ashamed of. She shrugs and says things like "what am I like?" when discussing what I'd consider to be a fairly basic, daily job, sometimes twice daily if there's time. Like pulling all the sofas out to vacuum clean the living room. That's not obsessive, that's just what you do. Jen, at least, doesn't say that she's a "bit OCD" as some people do. This has always annoyed me, it's like being a bit pregnant, it doesn't happen. I've met people with OCD. People who say they are a "bit OCD" have no idea what OCD means. She just smiles a winning smile, then gets on with doing what is, to my mind, a sub-standard job of cleaning her house. It's a nice enough house, though. A new-build, one of those ones with taller ceilings than necessary, to make it look bigger than it is. The cornices are a haven for cobwebs, and a nightmare to reach.

And when you go to their houses, they look, at first glance, to be tidy, but there's always a giveaway. There's always something to tell you that this person, this phony, is merely assuming the role of a compulsive cleaner in order to make themselves seem more interesting than they actually are. They are attempting to be quirky. The grill pan in an oven is always a good place to spot fakes: the metal grille always has little bits of brown gunk accumulated between the bars, it's disgusting. I never mention it, of course, that would be rude, and I never talk about my own cleaning habits, that'd be narcissistic. I know I'm cleaner than the rest of them, but I don't think any the less of them for it. Or at least, I try not to.

It has become my habit, upon waking, to strip the bed and then vacuum the mattress. I do this each morning. I don't understand why you wouldn't. What greater pleasure is there than sliding between clean, freshly laundered sheets? Who would deny themselves that pleasure daily? I read those little things on the internet about how many kilos of dead skin, and how many thousands of bugs the average mattress houses and I think, not mine, it doesn't. After this, I shower, it's a lengthy process, but I won't go into it, I wouldn't wish to bore you. Of course, after showering, I clean the bath, the sill which edges the shower-guard is particularly prone to collecting muck, and I keep a squeegee to hand to wipe the glass of the guard clear of water droplets. They stain.

My friend Jen washes her sheets twice a week, she grins slightly as she says this, and says what is she like, and I smile politely and shudder inwardly at how filthy they must be, how clogged with human dross. I don't ask about her bath. It looks, at first glance to be clean. But I know where I'd look, and I don't need to. I do wish Jen could be a bit tidier, but I never tell her this, I wouldn't wish to upset her. She reminds me of someone, I never tell her this, either.

I wasn't always as punctilious about cleanliness as I am now, I think back to my days at University, the foetid shared house, the arguments over whose turn it was to do the dishes. I could leave my bedsheets uncleaned without worrying about it, I left crockery and glassware in my room for days on end. I exchanged a variety of bodily fluids with a variety of people with no small degree of enthusiasm and very little regard for the probability of infection. I don't feel any pangs of nostalgia for those days though, I just feel desperately, achingly sad for the boy I was then, how he didn't understand the importance of keeping everything clean. He was blind, wilfully so, and his life was the poorer for it. He wouldn't have used the word punctilious either, which is a shame, maybe he'd have got a better degree.

It seems like only a few years ago that I first realised how important cleanliness was to me, though it was in actual fact seventeen. I had been out clubbing; I'd been seeing a girl who was a little cooler than I was used to, who talked casually and knowledgably about her time in Berlin and Barcelona, and was warily agreeing to do things she suggested, desperate not to blow my cover as a more interesting person than I actually was. I think she mistook my inability to say anything for a kind of aloof reserve. She'd taken me out of my comfort zone of indie clubs with their doubles bar deals and out to the edge of the city centre, where the only functioning building in an otherwise derelict street was a new club where a friend of hers was DJing. Afro-trance, I was told. Everyone looked amazing, I gazed at my trainers in disgust, but it was okay, my persona for her was the guy who doesn't care about that sort of thing, I think she thought I was making some sort of a statement, and the music was hypnotic, it seemed of course to be the most natural thing in the world to dance all night with people I'd never seen before but loved on sight, for they were here with me and this was now. Obviously I took drugs, that goes without saying, but I did a lot anyway in those days, so it's not like she was forcing me. Her skin shone in the strobe lights, and the refractions looked like the opening of the gates of heaven.

That is my last memory of that night. The next thing I know I was being shaken awake by some police officers. It was morning, the light was impossibly harsh. I was a mile or so away from the club, on the other side of the centre, the side nearest the river. They asked me a series of questions that I don't remember, the male police officer muttered something about me being a poof, he was huge, he dwarfed the cathedral behind him, I blinked at his enormity, the WPC seemed to orbit him, talking and talking in a soft midlands accent, and then they took me to a hospital which, I noted, was very clean, very bright. They put me in a gown which rustled and took swabs. A doctor asked me some questions, a nurse asked me some questions. I don't remember the questions, but I do remember the gel that you squirted on your hands. It smelled so clean, and right then that seemed to me to be a good thing. When I got home I cleaned my flat, every inch of it. It's been spotless ever since.

The other David Beckham

A good few years older than his namesake, and painfully shy. The other David Beckham was approached once at a school disco by a girl who asked him to dance. He had silently worshipped her for years. With all he'd dreamed of from ages eight through to twelve there in front of him he’d panicked and run to find his mum, who was chaperoning that night, told her he'd been sick and asked to go home. he spilled a cherry Panda Pop on his shirt to prove it. He’s never forgotten the moment and it’s coloured the rest of his life. Even now, forty-three years later, he finds it close to impossible to approach women, and he fixates upon that moment, willing himself into the past, willing his past self to say yes.

He worked for a time in the Civil Service, as a job centre adviser. In his work he was confident and precise, brisk even. Crisply dealing with the weekly searches of job-seekers, ensuring that they’d applied for the requisite number of positions and helping them find more. His efficiency meant that he was perpetually near the top of the office league table for success in shifting people from benefits into work, but he suffered a crisis of confidence after the suicide of someone who he’d placed in a job at a local supermarket. There were rumours of a bullying culture, and an investigation that was inconclusive. After that he found himself second-guessing every decision and slipped slowly, inexorably down the league, his supervisor stopped smiling at him and he was forgotten when the tea run was made. He left the job centre and drifted into an itinerant career, working variously as a bar man, a sales supervisor at a gift card shop, in the canteen of a shoe manufacturer and, latterly, as a customer service clerk at a bookmakers, where his shyness is matched by the diffidence of the daytime punters, the old men who don’t have smartphones and who still stare at the form pages of the newspapers which are pinned to the walls, muttering to themselves as they do so.

His most cherished memory is of a holiday to Croatia, taken when he was fifteen. A girl approached him as he sat on a wall next to the sea, kicking his legs against the arid concrete. She had green eyes face and honey coloured hair, and to his amazement she cradled his face in her hands and kissed him without a word. His first kiss, and one of only a handful he’s had so far, though he lives in quiet hope (there is a woman who volunteers at the church soup kitchen on Tuesdays who he thinks might like him). She smiled, turned and walked away. He didn’t go after her.