Enough with the cleaning – it's time we stopped giving bacteria such a hard time.

Emer Sexton delivers a late Christmas present and suggests that cutting back on the cleaning is not only good for the soul, it's good for the body.   

Christmas is almost over, the New Year has arrived with showers of rain, and happy children still play with new favourite toys and games.

These children are probably unaware of another activity taking place under their noses throughout the holiday season, an activity which they will show little comprehension of until they reach some semblance of adulthood.

This is a pursuit that many do not find pleasurable but must endure, sometimes on a daily basis, just as their parents and grandparents endured. This has gone on in every home and probably in every room.

I refer to cleaning of course, the endless chores of wiping, washing, brushing and tidying up.

Cleaning is a thankless, tiresome job. I hate cleaning and I look forward to a time when my career yields enough riches for me to hire someone else to clean my house.

I would like to make a distinction between cleaning and tidying up. We sometimes find ourselves in rooms that are untidy. Our eyes may be drawn to piles of books and newspapers, heaps of clothing, cushions in disarray, Lego waiting to bite into unsuspecting bare feet.

This is untidy, but the room may not necessarily require cleaning. However, once your eyes are drawn to herds of dust bunnies roaming the corners, a crumb-encrusted carpet, a bad smell and a sink of dirty dishes, then some cleaning is required.

So clean and tidy, wipe, scrub, brush the floor, put things away and do the washing up. In the end you may feel happy and satisfied but you are a poor, deluded fool. You forgot about bacteria.

You have cleaned until the house looks clean, but various chemical companies have revealed the secret world of bacteria, so in fact your home is not clean. Bacteria hang out everywhere in gangs a billion strong, pooping, dividing and multiplying exponentially.

To defeat the bacteria you are encouraged amid sordid promises of death and destruction to buy toxic substances you can’t spray directly on another living thing, and spray it on every surface in your house. Spray and wipe, wipe and spray and peer closely at the results. Success!

You decide to wash your hands and you realise (because an advertisement told you) that you cannot touch the soap dispenser to squish the anti-bacterial soap onto your hands as there are bacteria on your hands which may get onto the soap dispenser. Bacteria, unlike civil servants, like to be transferred.

Fortunately there are now automatic soap dispensers out there designed to remove this terrible dilemma from our lives. But if you don’t have one, you may be at an impasse. You use your elbow this one time.

You go back, you wash the floor with a cocktail of bleach and antiseptic and something that is supposed to smell lemony fresh. You wash mops, empty buckets, try to go to the toilet without touching it, clean it and wash hands again.

It is over, you can have a cup of tea. Then grubby disgusting children return from the bacteria-riddled outside and you know bacteria are back, dividing, multiplying, plotting. Later that evening you clean up again and go to bed, somewhat satisfied.

You poor deluded fool. Bacteria are an implacable foe and cannot be defeated that easily. Fortunately chemical companies are ever our friends and try to protect us from ourselves and from bacteria with no thought to profit, and so they have revealed to us that sneaky bacteria lurk in our clothes.

Fortunately they have developed a range of laundry detergents which promise to kill this particular bacterium, unlike other detergents which may just give it ammunition.

You buy it immediately and wash everything; clothes, bedding, curtains, rugs, car seats, carpets. Unfortunately for you, the hyper-sterilisation of your everywhere has left you with a crap immune system, and you get an infection.

Not viral (you see, we haven’t even started on viruses) but some sneaky bacterial chest rot you caught after an evening at the cinema, something that requires a prescribed assassin (also known as an antibiotic).

The antibiotics do their job and kill the bad bacteria in your gut, along with all the good bacteria. At last you are finally bacteria-free! Then you get a bout of IBS as it seems you have inadvertently destroyed your own internal microbial ecosystem.

It turns out that we basically walking bags of bacteria, and that our own very complicated cells evolved after making a win-win deal with some ancient bacteria long ago when society consisted entirely of patches of slime.

The good bacteria help keep you alive. But why isn’t anyone telling us this, you ask?

What is to be done? Do we exterminate ourselves to get rid of the bacteria? No, just stop spraying everything with bleach, don’t believe everything a multi-billion euro corporation tells you about how good things will be if everything smells of minty lemons and try to get in touch with your inner bacteria.

You may find that, rather ironically, you have to clean your toilet a lot less often.