The big bad world bites you in the bum in a number of ways. Each razor sharp tooth a responsibility that all come chomping down on you at once. With handling my own shopping being the first of my wounds to tend to, it was time to break out the Dettol for my next puncture mark - cleaning.

Having left the squeaky clean abode my parents tend to for a few weeks, it was becoming apparent that my house was gradually turning into more of a swamp. When the time came where it was a safer option to keep shoes on at all times, a house meeting was called. Convinced yet again we were going to nail this mundane task like the big grownups we were, we sat down as a group and drew ourselves a cleaning roster. A standard list of chores that alternated each week, from cleaning toilets to washing floors to scrubbing the alcohol that had found itself dried onto the roof from the weekend. We thought we had this one in the bag.

As the weeks went on our house was slowly looking like a place where human beings lived, it was nice. Now that I had a firm grasp on how to shop, appropriate cleaning products found their way into our trolleys. I began to view cleaning the house as a battle, and my stroll down the cleaning isle of the shops was my opportunity to load my arsenal with deadly weapons. Entering the field of battle I would blind my adversaries with windex and slice and dice my way through the field of enemies with a squeedgie mop, then as the battle draws to a close, rid the air of the scent my fallen foes with a victorious spray of vanilla air freshener. But as war movies have shown me time and time again, there’s always one soldier that you have to show which way to point his gun.

On this certain rotation for the week it was someone else’s turn to mop the floors. This week my friend Alex had been granted this noble duty. Away we went, burying our heads into our tasks so we could resume playing Fifa. Cleaning the living room I could hear Alex filling the mop bucket in the kitchen, I sighed a sigh of satisfaction as our little platoon was to complete their mission with ease until I heard a mass of water hit the ground, it had come from the kitchen...MAN DOWN! To my utter disgust, Alex had tipped the entire bucket of soapy water all over the ground, and was sloshing it back and forth, “this is what you do, yeah?”. It took every damn towel we could find to amend this monumental screw up.

Once again our hopes and dreams of finally being functioning adults were crushed. My mother visited the night of cleaning day shortly after we had finished. She looked around and said the house was disgusting. We were forced into chipping in weekly to pay my little sister to do it for us.

Lesson two – Cleaning.