High maintenance

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.