These days, we’re all more or less inhabitants of the rat race. Everything moves too fast and there’s never any time to get anything done. No matter what we do to try and cut down on time spent not relaxing, something else always seems to crop up to fill the “void” – that is, the void that was supposed to be all about free time. And even when we do get a bit of free time, we seem to end up filling that with all the domestic chores we would have done in some of the other time, if we hadn’t had to devote that to some other urgent business that just came up. It’s time we all started thinking about home cleaning services.

Think back to childhood, when every Saturday morning was ruined by parental insistence that we help with the washing up, clear the table, do the sweeping, tidy our rooms. Seriously? This was supposed to be our big relaxing time, and we ended up spending half of it on our hands and knees, swamped in Marigolds and dustpans. No wonder our adult lives seem more packed with domestic cleaning “appointments” than they do with nice cups of tea, or relaxing afternoons spent reading the paper. With a working week too hectic to do anything other than rise, work, eat, collapse, the UK population has railroaded itself into a situation where it can do little more than give u its weekends to home cleaning.

All this charging around, of course, is distinctly unhealthy. No wonder we all drink about nine times more than we ought, and spend half our lives consuming complex carbohydrates and trans fatty acids. A person has to have some treats, right? And if those treats can’t be delivered in the form of quality time then they’ll just have to be the kinds of guilty pleasures that, combined with all the aforementioned trans fatty acids, contribute to early coronaries and the kind of deterioration in health one would normally associate with a 90 year old. Domestic cleaning work, and not the kind done by us, could be our only salvation.

Imagine. Imagine having a home cleaning company, person, whatever, come in and do all that horrible work for you. Imagine actually having weekends free to do traditional weekend stuff – you know, like hanging out with the kids, catching up on some sleep, getting to a movie or going out to eat. We’ve not even touched on the whole children angle yet – the insatiable business of the modern world leaving precious little time for actually interacting with the little ones, whose welfare we apparently have in mind when we’re slogging our guts out in someone else’s office for far too many hours a week? All very well, one can just about suppose, as long as the “free” time (i.e. the time actually spent at home) is devoted to real family living and not just catching up on all the domestic cleaning one hasn’t had time to do during the week.

OK. So we’ve laboured our point with fair intensiveness. It is, mind you, a point that requires some labouring. There’s a reason for the existence of the home cleaning company, and it isn’t (as above) a particularly fun one. That said, here they are – and what’s the use of a professional house cleaning outfit if we don’t actually use it? Not using a domestic help company when you can afford it is a bit like not calling the police when you’ve been burgled. You might not like the reason for the police existing in the first place, but you’re sure as heck going to use them when you need them.

Domestic cleaning companies can do as much or as little as required – so they can simply come in and do the annoying stuff that you hate (cleaning the bathroom, for example); or they can do the lot and leave you and your family to enjoy a newfound life of Riley in those few short weekend hours you get together. It all depends on personal circumstances, of course – but in general home cleaning can slot in with whatever portion of delegated housework a person feels justified in shifting. The calculation is pretty simple: how much relaxation time do you need; or how much time do you have to find in order to get other things done? Domestic cleaning companies work by freeing you up to do work related things as well as sitting around watching TV, after all. In fact, a person is probably more likely to hire a home cleaning concern if they’re having trouble keeping up with work: yet another example that modern society has gone completely round the bend. Perhaps one day we’ll all admit that we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves if we didn’t have more work on the horizon than we can comfortably imagine completing. In the meantime, it seems, we’re only really comfortable hiring domestic cleaning assistance if the time freed can be directly returned as work done.

Now then. These companies are here, ostensibly, to make our lives easier. Why not let them? Let’s think about hiring home cleaning companies, not so we can do even more work, but so, for the first time ever, we can actually start doing less. Let’s give ourselves a break for a change. Let someone else do the ironing, sure – but let them do it while we relax in the park, or take the kids out to see a museum. Domestic cleaning, if we let it, could really offer an opportunity to reclaim some of that quality time so many of us seem to be missing from our lives and relationships. Work, up to a point, of course, cannot be ignored: but freedom, and free time, and actually having some fun, absolutely should not be sidelined. Reclaim the clock: find a home cleaning outfit and let them do all that hard slog, not so we can go off and do some more work, but so we can all relax a little. Who knows – we might even learn to enjoy it.

Home cleaning, home cleaning London