Are you guilty of PERFORMANCE CLEANING?

With guests imminent, self-confessed slob Sharon Wright embarks on a cleaning mission of a lifetime

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Dim the lights, turn off your phones and get your coughing out of the way - because the performance is about to begin. Performance cleaning, that is. The kind you do when people are coming to visit and you're seized by panic at the state of the house.

Because when it comes to matters domestic, I like to think I'm a bit of a bohemian, while literally everyone else thinks I'm just a lazy mare. If 'housewife' was still a thing (is it?) I'd be getting nul points. But visitors are arriving tomorrow and I've left the whole cleaning show until the 11th hour, so it's panic stations. And don't pretend you don't know what I'm on about - I've seen the dust on your pelmets.

One of my friends goes into cleaning overdrive to make a point when someone (OK, probably me) has thoughtlessly brushed crumbs off the table and onto the floor. This is passive-aggressive performance cleaning, but not my style. My style is hyperventilating because I don't know where the Hoover is.

When my son was three and asked why I was vacuuming because 'Daddy does that', I decided it was a victory for feminist role-modelling. Rather than a clue that Mummy's a bit of a slattern, happy to leave it to her infinitely more houseproud hubby.

So when I'm embroiled in the high drama of an emergency cleaning countdown decades later, I'm still not 100% sure where the vacuum actually is. I'm searching the house in a shifty manner and swearing under my breath when a sardonic voice from the garden intones: 'It's in the basement.'