Ceremonial visit

I've spent the last few days cleaning the house, granted I do this most weeks but this weekend my parents are coming to visit so naturally I need to step my game up.  As much as I hate having to clean (hey it'll all only get dirty again) I almost appreciate it when we get visitors because otherwise this place would turn in to a pig sty.  Admittedly it's normally a horses tack room seeing as my wife Elizabeth and I own two horses but it's still possible for it to go down hill.

Now back when I was a kid, my mum would occasionally ask me (usually when I left the house in a mess) what a prospective girlfriend would think about my untidiness, little did she realise that the answer was so simple, marry someone more messy than me!  You can tell where Elizabeth spends most of her time because there are little nests of stuff around where she regularly frequents.  Most of the time I really don't care, right up until a weekend when my mum is visiting and I'm left in charge of clearing up, because I know some of the stuff in these piles has been there since the last time they came.

Anyone who has met her will know that my mother is a formidable woman, I'm 6'4" tall and she's only 5" shorter than I am, not only that but I think she may have been a drill sergeant in a former life, if there's one person on this planet you don't mess with it's my mum, well ok I do, but I'm her son and have spent many years finding the line between smart arsed witty banter and getting smacked for being glib.  So it's not normally just her coming to see her youngest son, it also turns in to a formal inspection.  This means anything that's not up to muster will get commented on which makes an untidy house a big deal.  I already know my hair will come under scrutiny as I didn't get round to getting it cut this week and the garden will be brought up as we've barely touched it in the 10 years we've lived here so getting called on something that's not really my fault gets me worked up a bit.

Reading this you may be thinking that I'm not especially enamoured with my family and you know something, you'd be dead wrong.  I love both my wife and my mother dearly, not to mention my dad, brother, cousins, aunties & uncles.  I actually consider myself to be lucky to have such a nice happy family free from divorces and other issues that other people seem to have.  As far as I'm concerned nobody is perfect, we all have faults and foibles in our character that could be improved.  I could probably have an argument with my wife about tidying up, or tell my mum where she can go if she doesn't like how I live but it would only cause more problems than it would solve.  And so I clean.