I’m having a half-hearted go at tidying and cleaning the house ready for our visitor this weekend.

Well, not so much half-hearted, as half-bodied. No wonder my Gran survived a good 90 years without even knowing how to spell the word gym. There’s nothing like a bit of floor scrubbing and brushing and fighting with mats to get the pulse racing and the blood flowing.

Running on a treadmill or rowing all the way to nowhere becomes utterly redundant when you can do proper housework instead.

My trusty little heart is actually totally absorbed in this cleaning spree, pumping away furiously in the face of some unusual and unexpected physical effort.

It’s just my limbs and lungs that can’t get the hang of it. I huff and I puff and I blow the dust back into the room because I haven’t closed some orifice or other on the vacuum cleaner, and have to have a sit down.

I just don’t do housework. If I were down to my last tenner, I’d spend it on my lovely cleaning lady – yes, even if it were previously earmarked for food or wine or a fistful of EuroMillions lottery tickets.

But for some mysterious reason – utter despondency at her weekly Herculean task, perhaps – she hasn’t been able to join our dishevelled house for the past ten days, and now that our mate, Nick, is due over from Australia at the weekend I can suddenly see our domestic interior from a third party point of view. And it’s not an attractive sight.

Housework, like ironing and completing tax returns and flossing teeth, is the most dispiriting of tasks.

You could spend all your time on it, and no one is going to give you a lifetime achievement award, or marks out of ten, or even a word of appreciation or thanks.

Be honest – has anyone ever said to you that you’ve made a cracking job of the cuffs on that shirt, or that they particularly admired the way you responded to question 14b on your self- assessment tax return? No, me neither.

So, quite naturally, I prefer to expend my energies on something more likely to win a bit of praise.

How a domestic interior can become so messy and dusty when several of its inhabitants are out all day is beyond me. But I’ve been to cleaner civic dumps.

Cut it down into bite-size pieces, I say to myself. Nobody ever ate an elephant in one go. This tip was once doled out to me on a training course, and it’s an indication of the torpor that most of us fall into on such courses that no one put up their hand and questioned who among us had ever even contemplated eating an elephant, let along had gone to the drawer to get out the cutlery to do so.

Some time later, I’m pretty well finished – in all senses of the word. I pour the last bucketful of water down the sink, and look about me to admire my work. I open the French doors to deal with the bin bags and the black cat sneaks through. He jumps onto the sofa, retches violently, and the entire contents of his stomach – bloodied feathers, beak, a small liver, and plenty of gastric juice – neatly deposit themselves across the three seats. I stand looking at him for a couple of seconds. Try to see the funny side, I tell myself authoritively.

He was the elephant in the room, I say to myself, but I can feel my bottom lip starting to tremble.