Schrodinger's clothes

We've embarked on the long, slow cruise of the summer holidays. No, not a cruise. More like a spell on a desert island and endless repetition - Robinson Crusoe crossed with Groundhog Day.

Every so often, as if in a dream, I pick up armfuls of dumped possessions, convey them to another room for sorting, then redistribute them. There are shoes (always single, never in pairs); discarded exercise books, small plastic toys, nail polish, invariably missing the lid.

But worst of all are the clothes.

Schrodinger's cat was a theoretical beast locked, unseen, in its box, awaiting a randomly administered blast of strychnine. Because unseen, to the observer it was both simultaneously alive and dead.

But that was just the beginning. My, children, whose undoubted talents as theoretical scientists have yet to be fully appreciated, have evolved this principle into a modus vivendi that is providing endless family entertainment.

I am surrounded by Shrodinger's clothes. We have Shrodinger's hoodies, shirts and trousers. All are simultaneously both clean and dirty. They curl up on chairs like sleeping cats. They lurk behind curtains like burglars. They coil on stairs like pre-diet serpents.

The nub of the matter is that they are too clean to be added to the dirty laundry baskets that I have provided in such liberal quantities that they adorn every corner of the house like art installations. But they are also too dirty to be put away.

Of course, there are exceptions. You can't have Shrodinger's socks - or pants - at least in our house. Their status - always fully dead, often for some time - proclaims itself a mile off.

But with the rest it's science, experimental bloody science all the way.

And my maternal treat is to enjoy those few moments of their unique dual-natured, clean and dirty state before I pick them up and yell, like a fishwife, for my darling little physicists to get down the stairs, now!, and come and clear them away. Or else. And what that 'else' is, only Shrodinger knows.