I felt really weird when my English ex and I ended up getting a cleaner. I hated it whenever I was in when she came around, because I just had that desire to tell her not to worry and sit down with a cup of coffee instead. But that would sort of defy the point of having a cleaner, I suppose, if she just sat around drinking coffee for two hours.

BUT: Working 50-60 hour weeks both of us, we really didn't want to waste time washing floors and so on, but we had plenty of money to pay others to do it. And our cleaner (single mother with one son) obviously needed the money, so it made sense. Of course, she only did parts of the flat, never doing anything in the bedroom or in the study; that would've just been too private, really. And also this meant that when she was going to come around, we could clear all surfaces in advance by chucking stuff into the two rooms where she wouldn't be doing any cleaning. (Let's face it; cleaning somebody's study is just an impossible task, at least the sort of study we kept, where piles of books and papers where covering every horisontal surface... And in general I don't really want to go into the bedroom of a stranger. *insert disclaimer about exceptions for the bedrooms of really attractive strangers*) But it was all so weird...

When I lived in Paris I, of course, was the hired help. Though I was treated very much like just another teenage son in the family and everything was perfect, there were those moments in the afternoon when their cleaner was there (Rita was there 20 hours per week, doing all the cleaning, laundry, ironing etc. so I was 100% there to take care of the baby...) and Rita and I would sit in the kitchen and talk about "the Family" like some scene taken out of Upstairs-Downstairs! And we loved the family, and it really wasn't awkward in any way, Rita having been their cleaner for some 15 years when I was there. But when I thought about it every now and then it was just so strange... Hell; I was even living in a small room on the top floor, the old servats' quarters that every old apartment building in Paris has, though they are now mainly let out to immigrants and other people who can't afford more than 8x8ft with a wash-basin in the corner. And I loved it and it was utterly, utterly romantic and all, but then; I was a middle-class white boy who had access to a full bathroom and a well-stocked kitchen in the flat on the first floor, and I wasn't stuck in that wretched corridor on the 7th floor like most of its other residents. Just another foreigner slumming it up, really, before going back to the middle classes.