John Walker's Electronic House

I have come to the conclusion that there are a whole set of muscles in the human body, as yet undiscovered, that are uniquely used for housework.

Today, at God School, I ran down the six flights of stairs and then ran back up them, and arriving at the top I found myself not even out of breath. This is fairly impressive, since about two months ago I was getting a stitch reaching for the button to call the lift. However, upon reaching the top floor, I discovered I was holding a piece of paper in my hand that rightly belongs on the bottom floor. I had brought it with me quite mysteriously, and were anyone else to have seen I would have been mocked. And rightfully so, in the way that someone must be mocked when they bring the remote control into the kitchen, or search frantically for their mobile phone only realising where it is when they explain what it is they are looking for to the person they are speaking to on the phone. So, I ran back down again, returned the paper unwitnessed, and ran back up. This time, sadly, my new-found athleticism reached its limits, and like a first year student at four am, I was out of puff.

The point (as if) of all this is to attempt to prove that I am not quite so unfit as I have been previously. I can run down and up six flights of stairs (two at a time, mind) without requiring a helicopter to carry me home. With that established, why is it that the very moment I begin anything to do with housework I break out into a hot-faced sweat?

Hoovering. Hoovering is just walking around with a noisy pole. Why does hoovering render me exhausted? Why does tidying a room immediately have me out of breath and needing a nice sit down? It’s not as if I have some sort of allergic response to the act of cleaning – and yet I find myself needing someone to set up a stall in my front room offering plastic cups of water a soggy sponges every time I pass by with a dustpan and brush.

The result of this is that our carpet in the front room is: beige.