EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE: Dishing the dirt on the front page

It’s maybe not as pristine as “Hotel Inspector” Alex Polizzi would expect her room to be, but neither is it anything akin to the house of Philip May.

He had wandered into the newspaper office one day with a complaint about the council. They wouldn’t take his rubbish away. “There’s bags all over, it’s not right,” he said.

I needed to go round and see it, he added. Need was probably a bit of a stretch, but I agreed.

My suspicions were aroused as they were when another chap I interviewed — I can’t name him as he’s still about — said I needed to call in and meet the rest of his band.

As Mr May — wearing a fairly clean and respectable red anorak — and I walked round to his house in Exmouth, he told me how the situation had got a bit out of control thanks to the council who wouldn’t sort his problem. He didn’t understand why.

I anticipated that this might make a half-decent story, you know, front half of the paper, with Mr May as the victim.

It moved forward a few pages as we entered his back garden, which was strewn with black bin liners. “Look at it,” he said. “All over the ******* place.”

“There’s more in here, come in,” he said, the invitation irresistible as he unlocked his door.

There was more. About 200-300 bags more (at least he had bagged it up, I suppose), full of everything from food waste to general litter, cans and bottles.

“S***hole,isn’t it?” I shrugged, tactfully.

Just behind the door, the hallway was rammed with old bits of furniture, tools, a tyre, a rusting bike with no wheels, and there didn’t appear to be any route into the kitchen.

Should you still not be put off, layers of dust, grease and I dread to think what else were present at the scene of the grime.

A hastily conducted interview later and I was booking a photographer to capture the place in all its glory (gory?) — it wouldn’t be the focus of a through the keyhole property feature in a county lifestyle magazine any time soon.

On the plus side, the story made it onto page one.

The other guy, the one in the band, hadn’t handled a duster in a good while either. What he had handled, however, was a snake or two.

Him and his two mates sat together on a scruffy 1970s fire hazard settee, one of those that if you bashed it with your hand sent up a puff of dust, and he asked: “You’re not bothered by the snake, are you?”

I wasn’t, I said, it being a small, pleasantish-looking thing, but then I noticed its extremely large mate coiled up in front of the fire and another lizard-like creature on a shelf. I was bothered.

The singer-songwriter noticed my — I thought, well concealed — panic, and told me: “I’ve been going through some dark times.”

That interview didn’t last long.

The subject of the first of those two stories ended up on an environmental health charge — for the life of me I can’t see why — while the second went on to do rather well for himself, which shows that success is not dependant on such matters as cleanliness as life is largely a game of chance.

Of course, there is the possibility of death should your house become any dirtier than the two lived in by those featured in this column.

While I’ll never satisfy Alex Polizzi (in the cleaning sense, well, any sense), I think I’ll still stick to a regular dusting.