‘Hi I did Put it on It needed more’ is the pleasingly obscure haiku I find on my kitchen table.

It is from Denise, one of the most wonderful people I know. To give Denise a title — such as cleaner, cleaning lady, home help — would be disingenuous or even downright rude. Because it is fair to say that, in the years I have been privileged to know her, I have not only had my flat cleaned by Denise, I have had my mind broadened, my spirit fortified and my soul set on a path to a place where she assures me I shall surely find peace when the judgment day comes.

Denise, from Kingston, Jamaica, is a Jehovah’s Witness, though in all the time she has been coming to my flat she has never once left me one of those Watchtower leaflets on my kitchen table. I’m sometimes a little hurt that she hasn’t, especially since I came home one day to find she had foisted a set on Stefano the Albanian, when he had been there at the same time as her, fitting some shelves. I asked why he qualified for Watchtowers and I didn’t but she just laughed in that enigmatic way of hers. I never did get an answer, or a leaflet, even though I complained bitterly that maybe she ought to try them on me.

Instead, she leaves me haikus. I don’t know if they are meant to be haikus, but that is what they look like. Often they pertain to the lack of things to do. She gets very cross when the flat isn’t dirty enough, so cross in fact that I have been known to mess it up for her on the mornings she is due. She especially likes extracurricular tasks or minor domestic disasters that need sorting, such as plugs with blown fuses. If I could blow every fuse in the house she would finally think I had amounted to something.

She once sanded and varnished a whole set of garden furniture because the flat was ‘too clean’. When particularly bored by the parlously tidy state of my obsessive compulsive apartment, she likes to polish the pattern off things. She recently managed to remove the chrome coating from the lid of a coffee bean grinder, which, according to the manufacturer, should not have been possible.

When she is not complaining about the lack of work I give her, she tells me off for the high quality of the equipment I provide. The brand new Dyson that came from my parents at Christmas, while a matter of great pride to me, was a deep source of resentment to her.

‘Mey–lissa!’ she yelled from inside the understairs cupboard upon discovering it, ‘the ’oover no good!’

When I inquired as to why it was no good, she simply repeated that it was no good, about 50 times, and insisted that I give her the old broken vacuum cleaner back. When I refused she set about separating the Dyson from its plug. ‘Look, it come off!’ she chirped, holding a wire with no plug on the end in front of my nose, knowing full well I couldn’t fix a plug back on without her.

‘How did that happen?’

‘The ’oover no good!’

The logic of this, to her mind, being impeccable, Denise would not renege from her demands until a secondhand Henry of dubious performance was produced.

The new washing machine was a similar disappointment. The second the builder boyfriend plumbed it in and it became apparent that it did not leak she yelled, ‘No good!’

But somehow, she always gives me the impression that there is method in her madness. Even though the haikus have no discernible meaning, I pore over them wondering what she — or the power that speaks through her — is trying to tell me.

I can’t think what the ‘It’ in the latest one signifies, but I’m not surprised It ‘needed more’. I have had one of the most depressing weeks I can remember since writing an exposé of the RSPCA. I have been contacted by dozens of desperate individuals who have had their pets taken away and destroyed, all begging for my help. When I listen to their stories, I become filled with the most doom-laden sense of this being the most terrible, terrible world.

I could have done with being in the flat when Denise came because then she would have tidied my mind and dusted down my spirit, while moaning about how little there was to do.

She would have assured me that of course the world is terrible. The world is a wicked place. But it will all be sorted out when the judgment day comes. In the meantime: take one slightly dusty coffee bean grinder and scrub the chrome off the lid.