Helen Walne’s Human League

My parents arrive tomorrow.

I’ll be too exhausted to slice lemons for their G&Ts.

For the past three days, I’ve been like a set designer, trying to create an environment that doesn’t resemble reality. I even used a glue gun. And sugar soap. And a new mop that folds in the middle and leaves two trails on the floor like a dismembered snail.

The guest room – my parents’ temporary accommodation – required the most work. It usually resembles Gollum’s cave, if Gollum rode motorbikes, wore kimonos, had a fetish for pasta recipe books, and collected curtain hooks, underpants of unknown origin, broken mirrors, crates of CDs, strappy thingies, hairclips, hair, fabric thingies and 15-year-old shoes.

It’s a bit like Cope: a dumping ground for remnants of parties and things that don’t work. It’s not at all precious.

Now, after piling books into cupboards, moving all the thingies into our bedroom and giving away our collection of Now That’s What I Call Music volumes 1 to 12, the room looks less “Gollum” and more “student hobbit”.

I bought new bedding, scrubbed the skirting, and re-hung the curtains, tucking them behind the kist to hide the dog smudges.

In the bathroom, I removed the Viz annuals from the magazine rack (too rude), hid the ceramic bunny with the fangs (too weird), and chucked out the fern (too dead).

The kitchen required a Steven Spielberg makeover.

With its horror show of spilt spices, black bananas, piles of dishes and dead poppies, it was like a Lars Von Trier set for a Nigella cooking show.

Last week it even featured some impressive pyrotechnics involving the washing machine, a rusted plug point, a bang and a splutter of sparks. Eat your heart out, Hollywood. It cost me nothing.

Why is it like this? (Not the house – that’s easy to understand: laziness, more laziness, slovenliness, busy-ness, too much zesty white in the evening).

Why is it that at the age of 40, I’m still terrified of disappointing my parents? Why don’t I want them to see me in my natural habitat (cue David Attenborough whisper: “As you can see, this species burrows in piles of Telkom bills and forages on old rye bread”)?

Why, when I have my own dentist, opinions, potted orchid and medical aid, do I care what my parents think?

I’m not alone in this. My friend J has been smoking 400 Lucky Strikes a day since the age of 14. His duvet cover looks like a doily from all the times he’s woken up to the smell of burning poly-cotton. Yet, when his elderly mother comes to town, he doesn’t touch a cigarette.

“She’d kill me,” he says.

“No, I think British American Tobacco will get there first,” I reply.

For years, another friend, N, managed to convince her parents that the woman she lived with was “just a friend”, and that, yes, there was only one bedroom in the house and, yes, she slept on the couch every night.

Her parents live in Pietermaritzburg. They’re gullible up there. However, they eventually twigged that their daughter might have been frugal with the truth when they discovered N hugging her friend in an exuberant fashion behind a bush after drinking too many Pimms at a family christening.

There are other examples. My mate M’s language would make a trooper look like Mother Teresa. Yet throw his rheumy-eyed father into the equation, and you’d swear he had miraculously deleted every f*&% and s*#% from his subconscious.

Other friends stash their empty wine bottles in the garage, some hide their Hare Krishna cook books in a drawer, and I’m sure I must have one friend who hurriedly crams a gimp suit into the broom cupboard. I don’t know who you are yet, but I’ll find out.

And that’s the bottom line: we don’t want to be found out. Our parents sacrificed many years of hard drinking to raise us. They moulded us according to their beliefs. They saved up to buy us Scalextrics.

At their age, it would be a shame for them to see what we have become.

My mother says perhaps it’s also because I respect them. She might be right.

However, I’ve watched her handle a whole chicken, slapping its naked butt as she wrestles it into a roasting pot. At 60-odd, she’s a tough old bird. I wouldn’t want to risk leaving even a crumb lying around.

[email protected]; Twitter: @walnehelen