WHEN the phone rang at 8.40am on Saturday I almost didn't answer. Our weekends are usually pretty hectic as we rush around dropping off and picking up boys from a range of training sessions and sporting fixtures, often many miles apart.

But lately, ever since the football season finished and cricket has been repeatedly cancelled due to rain, we have been enjoying the welcome luxury of a few lazy Saturday and Sunday mornings.

I was still in my pyjamas. The papers had just arrived. The tea was in the pot. And then I made the mistake of picking up the phone.

"Hello, Ruth, it's me, Jo. I need a big favour." Yeah, sure, I said. Jo is one of the mums from the boys' school. She's also an interior designer and she and her husband are doing up a house.

"I'm on my way to meet our tiler and he says it's impossible to tile the shower the way I want it, which is just like yours (she came to see it a few years ago when it was first done). I need to take pictures of your en suite to show him."

Of course, I said. When do you want to come? "I can be there in 15 minutes," she said.

"Fifteen minutes?" I squeaked, trying not to sound too panic-stricken as the music from the Psycho shower scene played in my head, along with flashes of pictures from our bedroom and en suite.

Crumpled clothes all over the floor. Newspapers strewn about. Underpants and damp towels in a heap by the bath. Old coffee cups all over the place. Husband in the bed - husband in the bed? As I let out a silent scream, Jo spoke: "I'll see you at nine then, byeee."

I raced upstairs, three steps at a time. Now the soundtrack in my head was less Psycho, more Benny Hill in high-speed chase mode. I had to sort out our bedroom and en-suite in about - I looked at my watch - 14 minutes.

When I opened the door the first thing I saw was the husband in the bed - snoozing. Not the sort of thing you usually see in the pages of Homes and Gardens magazine.

I didn't have much time to explain. So I just screamed hysterically, without pausing for breath: "An-interior-designer-is-coming-round-to-take-photographs-of-our-bathroom-in-thirteen-and-a-half minutes."

I suppose it must have been an alarming wake-up call. He looked at me as if I was mad. "But I was just about to have a bath..." I didn't have time for this. I shooed him out of the room, just like my mother used to shoo our cat with a broom when it got under her feet.

I surveyed the scene. It looked like we'd been turned over in a burglary, or something that might feature in the How Clean Is Your House? TV programme about extremely disturbed people who live in what look like council rubbish tips. How could I transform it in... 13 minutes?

Fleetingly, I wondered if I should just burn the house down. Thankfully Roscoe, the eight-year-old, had followed me upstairs. "I like cleaning, Mum. Can I help?"

And so we whizzed round the room, the Benny Hill theme tune in my head as we made the bed, stuffed clothes into drawers, dumped more piles by the washing machine, got rid of the rubbish, cleaned the bath, sink and toilet, polished the mirrors and the glass and mopped the floor.

It's amazing what you can do in twelve-and-a-half minutes. When Jo arrived, everything was sparkling. She got what she wanted. My husband was eventually allowed into the bath. I breathed a sigh of relief.

But I couldn't help wondering, would most people, like me, be sent into a blind panic by such a phone call?

Or are there actually women out there who, like the domestic goddess Bree Van De Kamp in Desperate Housewives, are up, looking glamorous and baking muffins, by 8am, with every nook and cranny of their home spotless?

WHEN Albert spent a whole morning at playgroup recently painstakingly threading pasta pieces onto string to make me a necklace, of course I had to wear it. (He kept asking where it was if I didn't.) One day, he also insisted on putting the sticker with "Good work" and a tick that he was awarded at nursery on my T-shirt: "It's a present for you," he said sweetly. As if this wasn't enough, when I cut my hand, the only plasters we had left were covered in pictures of the friendly green ogre Shrek from the new children's movie. Is it any wonder people stared as I did the supermarket shop?

FIFTEEN-year-old William was alarmed when he got in from school and heard the message on the answer phone from his headmaster asking his dad or I to call him back. "What does he want to talk to you for?" he said, panicking. It was pretty innocuous, to do with a parental survey about sports facilities, but my husband was quick off the mark: "They need a parent to go on your school French trip next week and wondered if one of us would step in," he said. Of course, we did put the poor boy out of his misery - after a few days.