Sign in to share
Shikha Sharma
The guests were coming at 7:30.
At 7:15 my husband and I were doing the thing we always do in the ten minutes before guests arrive, which is move through the flat at high speed making it look like people who are on top of things live here.
The cushions went back. The dishes that had been drying on the rack went into the cupboard. The thing on the coffee table that had been there for three days got moved to a place it did not belong but where it would not be visible. The bathroom was assessed and found adequate by one of us and inadequate by the other and a brief disagreement happened about the standard of adequate and was resolved by the person who cares more about bathroom standards winning, which is always me.
At 7:22 my husband said do you want to change. I said I thought I was fine. He said no, fine, you look fine. The delivery of this suggested he had a view he was not going to share. I said what. He said nothing, you look great. I changed. He was right but I did not tell him he was right.
At 7:25 we looked at each other. The flat looked better than it had at 7:15. We both looked acceptable. We had five minutes.
My husband said should we have some chai quickly. I said we did not have time for chai. He said we had five minutes. I said making chai took longer than five minutes. He said not if he made it quickly. I said making chai quickly was not how chai worked. He said he could do it. He could not do it. We did not have chai.
The guests arrived at 7:31. We were ready. The cushions were right. The bathroom was adequate. We had Sunfeast Marie Light on the table as part of the snack arrangement because that is what our tables look like when guests come and also in this case what our tables look like on any given day because neither of us is very good at putting things away.
We were ready. We were also, if you looked closely, exactly the kind of couple who had been speed-cleaning for the previous fifteen minutes.
The guests did not look closely.
The Speed-Clean
The speed-clean is an art form that I have been practising since I moved out of my parents' house and started hosting people.
The principles are: visibility over thoroughness, frontal surfaces over corners, anything that can be closed should be closed, and the kitchen is the most important room because it is the room that tells people how you actually live.
My husband's principles are different. His speed-clean addresses the living room and considers the job done. He does not think about the kitchen as a separate category. He does not think about whether the bathroom looks like an intentional bathroom or an accidental bathroom. He addresses the visible living room and stands back and considers the flat ready.
This leads to a division of the ten minutes in which I am doing multiple rooms simultaneously and he is doing one room at a medium pace and we both finish at approximately the same time because I cover more ground faster and he covers less ground more thoroughly and the outcome is similar but the experience of arriving at the outcome is not.
We have discussed this. He considers his approach reasonable. I consider his approach to be an incomplete application of the speed-clean principle. We resolve this by each doing what we do and not supervising each other and the flat gets ready.
The What Are You Wearing Question
The what are you wearing question is the most dangerous question in the ten-minute window.
It arrives between five and eight minutes before the guests are due. There is not enough time to make a meaningful change if the answer requires a meaningful change. There is just enough time to create doubt about the choice that was already made and to make someone change something minor that does not actually need changing.
My husband has asked the question four times in the last year. Each time I have changed something. Each time I have been mildly annoyed at having changed something because the original choice was fine and the change was unnecessary and I would not have changed it if the question had not arrived.
He does not ask the question maliciously. He asks it because he is thinking about the evening and he is thinking about how we will look and he is doing a quick assessment of the readiness. The question is an assessment. It lands as a critique.
My friend Priya has the same arrangement in reverse. She asks the question. Her husband changes his shirt. She says he looks exactly the same. He says the other shirt had a mark. She says she did not see a mark. He is wearing the new shirt. The guests arrive.
She said she has stopped asking the question because the shirt change adds four minutes to the preparation and they are usually already in the eight-minute window by then.
The Last Disagreement
Every ten-minute window contains a last disagreement.
Not a real disagreement. A compressed version of a disagreement. The disagreement that would take twenty minutes if you had twenty minutes but that you have eight minutes for and so it is abbreviated.
The chai disagreement in our flat was the last disagreement before the guests arrived. It resolved in the standard way, which is that the person who is right wins because there is no time to negotiate and the person who is right usually knows they are right and states it clearly and the other person does not have time to construct a counterargument.
I was right about the chai. He was right about the shirt. We were both right about different things. We had guests at 7:31 and the flat was ready and we were standing at the door looking like people who had been ready for some time.
We were not ready for some time. We were ready at 7:29.
Two minutes. That is the margin. That is always the margin.
