For Mother’s Day I asked for one thing: a house cleaning service.

In the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, Gemma Hartley bemoans the chore of getting her multiple bathrooms cleaned by someone else. Actually, the clean bathrooms are, it turns out, a secondary concern:

The real gift I wanted was to be relieved of the emotional labour of a single task that had been nagging at the back of my mind. The clean house would simply be a bonus.

It’s been said, here at least, that when someone uses the term “emotional labour” unironically, the person doing the mouthing is most likely a bit of a nightmare. Say, the kind of woman who complains about the “emotional labour” of hiring a domestic cleaner. Or the kind who bitches about her husband and his shortcomings in the pages of a national magazine, where friends and colleagues of said husband, and perhaps his own children, can read on with amusement.

My husband waited for me to change my mind to an “easier” gift than housecleaning, something he could one-click order on Amazon. Disappointed by my unwavering desire, the day before Mother’s Day he called a single service, decided they were too expensive, and vowed to clean the bathrooms himself. He still gave me the choice, of course. He told me the high dollar amount of completing the cleaning services I requested (since I control the budget) and asked incredulously if I still wanted him to book it.

Details ensue.

What I wanted was for him to ask friends on Facebook for a recommendation, call four or five more services, do the emotional labour I would have done if the job had fallen to me.

Many details.

I had wanted to hire out deep cleaning for a while, especially since my freelance work had picked up considerably. The reason I hadn’t done it yet was part guilt over not doing my housework, and an even larger part of not wanting to deal with the work of hiring a service. I knew exactly how exhausting it was going to be. That’s why I asked my husband to do it as a gift.

This, it seems, was unknown to said husband and so, alas, ‘twas not to be.

Sometimes, it can feel surprising that any beauty still exists in the world. It can feel wrong to keep cultivating our gardens while the world shatters outside our windows.

Yes, it’s time to once again gawp at the mindset of the Salon-reader demographic. Or at least the Salon-writer demographic, with which it presumably overlaps. Specifically, a piece by Ms Alex Dew, “a recent graduate of Eastern Washington University’s Master of Fine Arts programme in Creative Nonfiction,” and whose urgent bulletin to the world is titled My Houseplant Garden Is A Tiny National Park Donald Trump Can Never Destroy.

If that sounds a tad overwrought and not entirely even-keeled, do read on.

I begin each day by taking a mental inventory of whatever horrors Trump has committed since I have been asleep,

As one does.

scrolling through news outlets and social media on my iPhone, even though I know that this probably bad for my mental health.

I suspect this may be a matter of putting the cart before the horse. And perhaps tellingly, mental health is mentioned more than once in Ms Dew’s article.

There is evidence that Trump’s presidency has had a negative effect on the mental health of many Democrats, with 72% of those surveyed in one study reporting an increase in anxiety since he has taken office. Sometimes, it’s enough to make me not want to get out of bed.

A phenomenon at which we’ve previously marvelled. More than once.

After reading the news, it is time to attend to my indoor garden, to do the work of keeping my plants alive: the trimming and the watering and the fertilising. This work is meditation, a way of going on.

Yes, going on. Bravely, heroically, and despite the realisation that your preferred candidate lost an election, four years ago.

From the pages of The Atlantic, a new torment for woke sophisticates:

The hidden bigotry of crosswords.

That sound you hear is barrel-bottom-scraping.

The popular puzzles are largely written and edited by older white men, who dictate what makes it into the grid—and what is kept out.

The world of woke crossword-puzzlers – because that’s a thing that exists – is one in which enthusiasts, via social media, grumble about white men, bemoan the insufficient prominence of “queer or POC colloquialisms,” share “off-colour jokes about hypothetical titles for a Melania Trump memoir,” and fret about the exact ratio of male and female names used as clues. Because a lack of “gender parity” in crossword puzzle clues constitutes one of “the systemic forces that threaten women.”

Crossword puzzles can do that, apparently.

The list of possible crossword-puzzle wrongdoings is, of course, extensive, ever-growing and not entirely straightforward.

Transgressions include clues for ILLEGAL (“One caught by border patrol”); MEN (“Exasperated comment from a feminist”); and HOOD (“Place with homies”). 

I’ll give you a moment to steady yourselves, to recover from all that gasping.

Speaking, as we were, of enthusiasts of crime, meet communist poet Wendy Trevino:

When I see tweets of this nature – repeated slogan, repeated slogan, repeated slogan – I tend to think the tweeter is either adolescent or unwell. Ms Trevino is supposedly a grown woman. One who appears to have a complicated relationship with her father. Sometimes the clichés are just too on-the-nose. When not advocating shoplifting and being titillated by visions of collapsing social norms, Ms Trevino, our communist poet and Antifa Gal, wants us to know how pleased she is by criminals escaping prison and taking hostages. What said prisoners may have done to be there in the first place, and what they may do again now that they’re at large, doesn’t seem to interest her.

Update, via the comments:

This is the nice version of what happens when the state justice system fails and private individuals must step in to fill the void. There is also a less nice version.

Over at Samizdata, Natalie Solent is pondering this item of crime and policing news. Or rather, non-policing news:

It was no surprise to anyone who knew Nicholas Richards, a career criminal with 25 convictions including 18 for shoplifting, that his motives were not entirely honourable when he walked into Boots. Witnesses described him stealing £170-worth of Gucci perfume; CCTV footage recovered from the chemist’s flagship branch in Piccadilly showed him putting the goods in his bag; and cameras worn by private security officers who detained him recorded him admitting the offence.

So staff at Boots, which loses between £10,000 and £12,000 a week to shoplifting, were upset when police officers arrived on the crime scene, decided the case was a “civil” matter and released Richards, who was already on a suspended sentence for theft. Boots was furious about the failure to dispense justice and decided to take part in what is believed to be the first private prosecution for shoplifting supported by a corporate victim.

The case is being brought by TM Eye. Set up by two former Metropolitan police officers, it is the parent company of My Local Bobby (MLB), which provides neighbourhood policing to residents, firms and shops. Its 30 “bobbies,” who wear red vests and caps, provide 24-hour cover. They are mostly former police officers and soldiers.

In the comments following which, a reader adds,

Anyone with 25 previous convictions should not be on our streets.

Some time ago, I suggested, not entirely flippantly, that a “three-strikes-and-we-put-you-out-to-sea-on-a-fucking-raft” policy might be quite popular. Readers are welcome to use the comments below to share alternatives.