Willy Trolove: When one black hair is replaced by another, cheat

Cleaning the bathroom is a recreational activity enjoyed by few people. In fact, if you are male and over a certain age, it is likely you haven't cleaned the bathroom for years.

I'm not talking about the occasional squirt of toilet cleaner from a safe distance. I'm talking about a full-on, get-down-on-your-knees-and-scrub kind of clean that would make your mother proud.

If this is the case, please take this opportunity before the females in your household read today's newspaper to tear out this page and throw it away.

Because, if you haven't cleaned the bathroom for a while, this column can only have unpleasant consequences.

Men will go to great lengths to avoid cleaning the bathroom. They will find a problem with the roof that needs fixing, volunteer to visit their mother-in-law, or, if all else fails, physically mutilate themselves.

I've always thought that Vincent Van Gogh was not mad. He just cut off his ear because he wanted to get out of scrubbing the toilet.

It helps that many men have developed a powerful belief system. This consists of two irrational and contradictory beliefs. The first is that no matter how grubby the bathroom gets, it doesn't need cleaning. The second is that somehow the bathroom cleans itself.

Women struggle to understand these beliefs. For example, when the bathroom is grubby, they may repeatedly tell the men in their household, "The bathroom needs cleaning". If this gets them nowhere, they will follow up with, "It's not going to clean itself, you know".

But true believers are never swayed by rational arguments that sound like nagging.

And so, if women want men to clean the bathroom, they must use other techniques, such as threatening to withhold food, suspending certain bedroom privileges, or moving out.

Punishments are, however, less effective than inducements. Few cases are recorded of a man cleaning the bathroom just because a woman has left him. But many a woman has inspired a man to become a loo-cleaner by granting him some illicit pleasure that he is not normally allowed, such as pineapple lumps after lights out.

Unfortunately, offering inducements is a hit-and-miss affair, and most women can't be bothered with all that hitting and missing.

Instead, they clean the bathroom themselves. This is not because they enjoy it. They just have higher standards of hygiene and are less willing to contract hideous diseases whenever they go to the lavatory.

Let's face it. Nobody enjoys cleaning the bathroom.

If I asked you to rank your least-enjoyable domestic activities from one to 10, with one being mildly unpleasant and 10 being the sort of thing you'd only do to avoid your fingernails being pulled out by a demented hunchback with an evil laugh, cleaning the bathroom would score the highest, well above de-worming the dog and trying to find out what that funny smell is coming from the back of the refrigerator.

There is no easy way to clean a bathroom. Thick gloves, protective clothing and goggles can help. But the lack of mobility and vision and the associated disorientation can often result in you cleaning your bedroom, cleaning your car, or cleaning your spouse instead.

Besides, if your gloves are too thick, it will be difficult to extract from the shower plughole those accumulations of intimate body hairs that, as far as you can tell, don't actually belong to anyone in the household.

By far the larger difficulty is an aesthetic one. Modern bathrooms tend to have white surfaces and are full of white objects, such as toilets, showers, vanities, and your Uncle Bert naked.

The detritus in a modern bathroom tends to be dark. The cloth or sponge you use to clean away the detritus tends to be moist. Put these things together and cleaning the bathroom becomes impossible.

No matter how hard you try, there will always be one dark hair you can't remove from the white surface. If you do remove it, it will be instantly replaced by another dark hair that until now has been happy to stay on the cloth.

And so cleaning the bathroom is an exercise in moving the detritus around.

If you have cleaned the bathroom well, all you have done is moved the detritus from obvious locations to less-obvious locations behind the moisturiser bottles.

In other words, cleaning the bathroom is all about pretending that you've cleaned it. Line up the shampoos. Rearrange the toothbrushes. Fold the end of the toilet paper into a neat little V. Soon the bathroom will look like it has been cleaned by a professional.

Then, all you have to do is declare loudly and repeatedly that the bathroom is clean. Nobody will look too closely, and with a bit of luck you won't have to clean it again for another few years.