‘That’s not, like, mess mess,’ I say to myself, looking at the plastic bin filled with bubble-wrap atop our fridge. It’s about 2ft tall, bulges with packing tape and – I think – Christmas wrapping paper. I stopped being capable of consciously seeing it about a year ago but, in preparation of our babysitter’s arrival, I’m heaving it to the front door, so it can be taken away with the recycling.

She will be our first babysitter who’s not a relation, so I’m finding it hard to act natural, and fretting about appearances. The trick to a good babysitter experience, it seems, is to hire someone who won’t rummage through your things, but to clean your house as if they definitely will. This we did, transforming our house into the antiseptic hellscape we presume respectable people live in; no load-bearing food stains, no unwieldy clutter in every room. We cleaned the fridge door, scrubbed the bathroom mirror and washed out the cutlery drawers, careful to remove the biros and bits of fluff which had therein accumulated.

A certain degree of mess becomes invisible to a house’s occupants, and parenthood only makes this worse. Life becomes such a never-ending sequence of larger wars against viscous effluent and bodily ejecta, smaller battles soon seem pointless. So it was that, for the first time in over a year, I noticed that the small saucer by the kitchen door - which once held loose change and a spare key - now holds about 18 quid in change, some crumpled bank statements, a USB stick, and a little bag of earphone accessories for a phone I lost two house moves ago.

There are only so many aspects of this slovenliness I can blame on the baby, but I don’t mention this when the babysitter arrives. Instead, I map the frontiers of her patience via lengthy, facile explanations of how every house on earth works. This, she learned with some fascination, was a bathroom and, over here, we call this a TV. Pointing to the milk I’ve left on the table for the baby, I tell her that it’s milk I’ve left on the table for the baby. Hearing myself say she can help herself to whatever she likes from the fridge, I realise I’m just role-playing adults I’ve seen in American movies, and decide it’s time to go.

I returned after a lovely time in the pub to find the house as I left it. Our baby remained mostly asleep and our sitter was not an inveterate rummager, nor an undercover health inspector. I give thanks for her time and wave her off from the door, happy to have passed a test that was almost entirely in my own head. Walking back inside I find the bubble-wrap bin is under my arm, and is soon back in place above the fridge. A jolt of change is good, but we needn’t be too hasty, after all.

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