We need to get back to normality, and fast – I appear to have fallen in love with my robot vacuum cleaner

It is absurdly easy to anthropomorphise this creature, which spins around picking up fluff – especially in the absence of a puppy or a baby in the house, writes Jenny Eclair

In some respects it has the brain of a toddler intent on getting its head stuck between the bannister rails (Getty)

I’ve furloughed my cleaner again. I’m not sure whether this is in line with everyone else but, let’s face it, the rules are all over the place. Who even knows any more? Two girls get stopped by police for having a walk in a wide open space and yet several shopkeepers in my local area are mask-free and unrepentant.

The new Covid variant has got me properly frightened. I live on one of the main roads leading directly to Kings College Hospital and the other day, in the time it took me to make a cup of coffee, four ambulances wailed by.

What should I be doing to protect myself, my partner and the NHS right now? Should I be disinfecting packaging and leaving mail unopened for 72 hours? This is something a lot of people have been doing since March, but personally I’ve never bothered, concentrating instead on washing my hands umpteen times a day, social distancing and wearing a mask in shared indoor spaces. But if disinfecting packaging would help, then tell us and count me in.  

Apparently this new variant of Covid is 70 per cent more infectious, but how does that transmission manifest in practical terms? Can you pick it up from a park bench, for example, because some of these are taped off and some aren’t? Ditto with children’s playgrounds: why are some open and others closed? How safe are we outdoors?

Recently I’ve taken to wearing a mask when out for a stroll. One of my local green spaces has a measured running track and the amount of heavy breathing in the vicinity is frightening. Honestly, it used to be gangs of hooded youths that made me anxious in the park; now it’s competitive Dulwich chaps in their forties puffing and panting. As for my weekly shop, from now on it’s a mask and a visor. I’m not sure what else I can do.

Well for starters, I suppose I can clean my own house. I put the cleaner back on a retainer, mostly because she needed to use public transport to get to my house and, whatever the rules are, I didn’t think that was fair on any of us. In her absence and because I’m a lazy cow in need of further pandemic distraction, I have bought a robot vacuum cleaner. I really wanted a dog, but it’s not practical – the old man’s allergic and, as I only really like certain dogs (dachshunds and poodles), I don’t think I’m enough of a dog lover to warrant having one, it would be an affectation.

So instead we are lavishing all our affection on a rotating disc that spins around our open plan ground floor, picking up fluff and pine needles. It is absurdly easy to anthropomorphise this creature, especially in the absence of a puppy or a baby in the house.

As we set her off on her maiden voyage around the kitchen, we couldn’t take our eyes off her. It was like watching your own child in a nativity play: look, see how clever she is, watch her spin.

Within minutes we were talking to it in those disgusting encouraging tones one uses with very small children and rescuing it from tricky tangled cable situations and difficult spaces. We started discussing how we were best going to robot vacuum-proof the house to make her life easier in future. “She doesn’t like that pile of drawing paper under the sofa,” I heard myself say. “It confuses her.”

In some respects it has the brain of a toddler who is intent on getting its head stuck between the bannister rails and had it started crying when it got wedged under a chair, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised.

Apparently your average robot vacuum cleaner takes some time to learn the layout of your home. Once it’s got the dimensions and furniture mapped out, it gets more efficient and knows which zones are “no go” areas. Already we feel that ours is brighter than most and will probably learn the principles of navigation very fast – faster than any other robot vacuum cleaner.

Once your robot has the layout sussed, she can be programmed to go about her business in the middle of the night, so that she doesn’t get under your feet during the day. Oh, brave new world.

But at the moment, considering she is fresh from her box, we don’t feel confident in leaving her to her own devices and so we sit and stare at her as she zig zags around the sofa and tries to chew a shoe-lace.

Eventually after an hour of semi efficient and painfully slow hoovering, she got tired and a light started flashing on the top of her head, indicating the need to return to her charging dock. At this point, rather than let her crawl back to her station, the old man picked her up and said: “I’ll just put her back in her cot.”

I’m not worried yet, but I have a feeling the next step might involve giving her a name and knitting her a cozy jacket. This pandemic has the strangest of side effects.