High maintenance

Melissa Kite

Since when did we become incapable of doing anything for ourselves? It started off with cleaners. In the bad old days only rich people had cleaners. Now everyone has a cleaner. Cleaners have cleaners.

The golden age of cheap foreign labour means that nobody has to tidy up their own mess. Or cook their own dinner, or dig their own garden, or feed their own cats, or, indeed, do their own job.

My friend Catherine has a PA. My friend Catherine is a PA. Since when did a PA need a PA? And what happens when the PA’s PA needs a PA?

Doing boring things for yourself is just so Nineties. Outsourcing, that’s the buzzword.

Whereas our parents rolled up their sleeves and got on with it, we are the generation who said, ‘Get someone in.’ Nobody wants to do anything that could be done by someone else at great expense any more.

I have several friends who pay their nanny more than they earn, rather than stay at home and look after their own children.

Shopping’s over. Shopping’s for losers. I complained about shopping to a friend the other day and she expressed flabbergasted disbelief that I was attempting to do it for myself. Did I not have a personal shopper, or retail technician as they are now known?

Don’t even think about cooking, obviously. Nobody cooks anymore. The students who live next door to me had a dinner party the other week, and one of those bespoke organic, wholefood caterers arrived to deliver finest wild salmon and macrobiotic pulses.

Still walking your dog? Thought the whole point of a mutt was the exercising of it? Not so. You want to ring ‘walkies.com’. According to the blurb on the side of their blue and pink vans, the arduous and hitherto soul-crushing requirement to attach your hound to a length of chain and parade it down the street has now been alleviated by the dawn of personal dogwalking.

Washing your face used to be a straightforward affair. I never gave it much thought before now. But that was before I discovered the ‘facialist’. The facialist can wash your face much better than you can and it only costs £80. My mother used to enjoy painting her nails. Now she has a nail technician.

Preferably all personal staff must come to your house, and you must refer to them as ‘my’, as if you own them. ‘My’ personal trainer, tai chi instructor, accountant, time manager. They also have to be described as ‘marvellous’. If a friend has a rival reiki masseur it is important that you make clear that yours is superior. Ditto your nutritionist. Your nutritionist should be spotting more foods that are poisoning you to death than your friends’ nutritionists, who will be overlooking all manner of fatal wheat intolerances, sugar addictions and coffee allergies which your man has brilliantly spotted. In any case, you clearly cannot decide what you like to eat yourself. That is madness.

My little army of helpers is still in its infancy and I’m amazed at what I have already ceased being able to do. Since acquiring a cleaner, a catsitter, a gardener and an oddjob man called Tony I find myself quite incapable of doing all manner of tasks. Only Tony, for example, can now change light bulbs, switch radiators off and get stuff down from the top shelves in my kitchen. I am at a loss to know how to negotiate leaves unless I call Pete the gardener. I must say, however, that both Tony and Pete are frustrated men. I get the impression Tony is tired of being called out and paid £70 to open stuck doors. And as I have only a small paved area at the rear of my house poor Pete rarely has anything to do at all. The last really exciting commission I gave him was to bury the cat.

Still, I can’t help thinking that there are other areas of my life I could be outsourcing. Talking to friends on the phone, for example. A personal friend manager might be able to do all the pointless gossiping for me and then issue me with a summary of things I need to know, mostly advice about facialists.

I also need a catsitter-sitter. Someone to come in and check that the catsitter has sat well enough. My friend Nicola solved this particular problem by having a live-in catsitter, a cat au pair, who, in return for a suite of rooms in her house and a small stipend, is on hand 24 hours a day in case there is a feline emergency.

Of course we could all just go home and sort out our stuff for ourselves. But that wouldn’t be very progressive, would it?

Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.