Luke – well, that’s almost the same, isn’t it? My mother has tried for over 30 years to beat some common sense and practicality into me, but we must all face the fact that I represent one of her rare failures in life. Luke – again for a fair rate of exchange – fills the void.

But a cleaner is different. I may be an idiot, but I can clean. It’s just that a) I’m very, very busy working and looking after the child and b) I hate it. Now, some people – the very cash-rich, time-poor – would claim a cleaner was a necessity. They might be right in their extreme cases. But for the majority of people for whom it is even an option, hiring a cleaner is at best a luxury and at worst (as my entire family vociferously consider it) the reckless, immoral indulgence of a gross personal weakness. The unofficial Mangan motto is ‘You clean up your own sh*t in this life’. It applies to both the literal and metaphorical detritus of life, and it’s not a bad principle to try and live by.

I’ve tried to ameliorate the wrongness of what I’ve done by employing a cleaner through a firm, which is expensive but means she gets sick pay, holiday pay, insurance and so on. And my husband tells me this is the way capitalism works – if you can earn more in the time saved than you are paying out to save the time, then doing so is A Good Idea. It’s the trickle-down effect in microcosm: those with more money and opportunities create jobs and opportunities for those lower down the socioeconomic scale. Unfortunately, my husband is a dyed-in-the-wool Tory whose every utterance is therefore not just suspect but violently wrong at every turn.

In (my) reality, we – like most people – have what we have because of a large amount of luck rather than pure hard work. Not that we don’t work hard (nor, incidentally, do we earn as much as this is all probably making it seem – it’s just that we never, ever go out or on holiday anywhere but Norfolk for a week), but this is secondary to the fact that we were born healthy, in the right place, at a good time, to happy families who made sure we were given all the education and chances they could muster. Thus we ended up with decent jobs and salaries. (We chose dying industries, of course, so we’ll get our comeuppance.) Unselfishly speaking, I should spend my spare time cleaning and donating to charity until global economic-and-everything-else parity is achieved. Instead, I chose to pay someone poorer than me to do an unpleasant job I’d rather avoid.

Now I’ve compounded the felony by hiring the man in the garden, undoing what mother nature and my own have allowed to run riot. Time to hack away at my own sloth, I think. In the end, it’s only cleaning up your own sh*t that really makes the garden rosy."

You can contact Lucy by email at lucy.mangan@stylist.co.uk or follow her at twitter.com/lucymangan

Do you agree with Lucy's view on hiring a cleaner? Let us know in the comments section below

"Hiring a house cleaner is not a necessity"