This summer, a mighty row on cleanliness broke out online, after Ashton Kutcher said he washed his crotch and armpits daily ‘and nothing else ever’. These arguments have now, inevitably, reached my bathroom
It was the last full day of a summer holiday that never really took its brakes off, weather-wise, but felt endless and elegiac nevertheless, and the 12-year-old and 13-year-old decided to mark the occasion with a bitter row over how often you should wash your hair. It wouldn’t have made it into their top-ranking fights (in order: who is more spoilt? Does nature contain maths? Can you be a vegetarian except on Fridays? And are dog years a thing, which was resolved, at least to my satisfaction, with the “there is no Dog Sun, therefore there is no Dog Year” line from TJ, the older one, even though I still agree with H that the dog is 35. I find the Solomon role tiring and decline to perform it).
However, this might yet be their longest argument, stretching from when they woke up, all the way through two baths, which may or may not have involved shampoo, right up to the early evening when I dropped them at their dad’s house. “They’re fighting,” I said jauntily, “and now it’s your problem.” “Stop fighting,” he intoned hypnotically, and they immediately did, but I took off with every confidence that they would start up again in 30 seconds.