Blaise Tapp: Coming clean on problems with doing the daily wash

Cleaning up has always been big business and mucky houses have long passed as entertainment - think Kim and Aggie and the many variations of programmes about super hoarders.

But now social media platforms such as TikTok are home to videos telling people with nothing better to do and are too young to watch This Morning how to nail mundane household tasks. One such creator, or influencer to give her the correct title, has written a book which is full of her tips about how to do the laundry properly. Having read the highlights it is now very clear that Mrs Tapp has been right the past 25 years, and I have indeed been doing the laundry wrong all of this time.

Like many long-suffering better halves, Mrs Tapp has long suspected my ineptitude with a washing machine is part of an elaborate plot to excuse me from the most demanding chore there is in a house with a teenage girl and a seven-year-old dirt magnet.

Truth is I never really pay that much attention to what I bung into the machine while racing around the house in an attempt to find missing shoes and coats before embarking on my daily equivalent of Russian roulette, aka the school run.

I’m often accused of the heinous crime of mixing up darks and lights and my go-to protests that anything other than white is technically a dark is now wearing thin, meaning that I should probably come up with a new line of defence.

I’m also often reminded that our futuristic looking washer has a wide variety of settings and not just ‘daily wash’ at 40 degrees.

Then there is the tedious long-running debate about whether some, more expensive, pieces of clothing are turned inside out before they are bunged into the drum and don’t even bother explaining how I should treat really soiled clothing before I press the on button and go back to trying to get more than four points on Radio 2’s new ultra difficult music quiz.