Anna's Handy Household Hints No. 2: How to be appreciated for the work you do

I recently spent 10 minutes scrubbing a hardened blob of jam off the wall in preparation for a dinner party.

Then I realized that all my work was for nothing because my guests would never know that the blob of jam was there. They would never know how hard I had worked to prepare for their arrival.

This gave me the idea of pre-visits.

A pre-visit takes place before you clean up, perhaps on the morning of the party. Invite the guests over for coffee. If you like, take them on a tour of the dirty areas in your house that you plan to clean.

Don't, however, show them the closet into which you've turfed every loose bit of living room debris for the last twenty years. If you trick yourself into having to clean that out on the afternoon of a dinner party,  you can be guaranteed to turn into a raving maniac and your husband will have you committed to the pscyh ward long before the first guest knocks on the door.

During the pre-visit you may, however, be tempted to serve the appetizers you had set aside for later that evening. Give in to this temptation. Also bring out the evening's dessert. It may be that the pre-visit is so successful that you decided, by mutual agreement, that the dinner party is no longer necessary.

Then you won't have to do any more cleaning at all. You could instead spend the afternoon lolling about in your pyjamas and watching Oprah.