Turn on the Olympics, it's time for a clean sweep Though I bought no tickets from the website (because I weedily allowed myself be defeated by the system both times I tried to proceed with purchase) I was nevertheless looking forward to London 2012 like anything. Having no internal driver in my brain to timetable my year or structure my day, I live through external stimuli. When Christmas looms, I bake cakes and buy presents. If it's almost Good Friday, I hurriedly buy seed potatoes. Now the Olympics are all but upon us, I can only accept that a fortnight's worth of bank holidays lays down limitations. It is, for example, pointless to try to get up to London for the usual appointments (lunch, new glasses) because the trains won't work and the fat cats and freeloaders in the Zil lanes will drive me to thoughts of murder. So I had a brilliant idea. I determined to amass the most boring bits of domestic labour that any decent housekeeper knows ought to be done (at the very least) biennially, and pootle away at them during the Olympics coverage. Which is finally on the same time zone as me - hurrah. Stuff like scrubbing down the backs of things, buffing up other things, mending things, sorting out things to chuck out and things to take to Save the Children. You can do all these sorts of things and feel quite good about life if there's a telly burbling along in the background to alert you that Tom Daley will be diving for gold soonish, probably, or that it will hopefully stop raining soonish, probably. I like an ambient noise to pootle to; it's easier for some people (me, J K Rowling) to work in a café than in a library. Obviously, one has to take the background noise as one finds it. We must all hope and trust that BBC Sport's burbling won't be as mindless as that unbearable commentary during the European footie final. Or, indeed, the kindergarten chatter behind the Jubilee Pageant, for which somebody should have been let go, to my mind, rather than promoted to director-general. My late mother always used to do pootling-around-the-house-type things in July and August, partly because the children were around to hold wool, and partly because the heavy gardening had eased up by then. Also, you can stand doors wide open, so scrubbed things can dry. Old habits die hard, and since Oscar Wilde was bang on about all women turning into their mothers, I have been especially looking forward to a London Olympics so I can get a day's work done. My ma was an Olympics maniac who had to be seriously nannied for the full fortnight, lest she die of a seizure in front of our horrified eyes. Sometimes I would walk into her sitting room on medication duty, to find her with eyes tightly shut, drumming her feet, and moaning: "It's too exciting. Sit beside me and tell me how he does. Indeed, mother, swallow these and do try to keep calm. She would cling to the arm of her sofa with one hand and clasp a grandchild or son-in-law with the other, while watching everything with a Briton in it that ran, swam or flew through the air. She watched the Olympics in winter as well as summer. She watched through the maddest time zones: Seoul in 1988 was really weird and everybody she was tapping her feet for won silver (Fatima, Linford). Her last summer Games was Sydney 2000, where the coxless chaps won her a great fistful of handsome golds. She didn't make Athens 2004. London would have overwhelmed her. I was really looking forward to watching it in her memory; even making myself slightly curious about whether Danny Boyle's stage-setting genius (as seen in Frankenstein, Slumdog Millionaire and that strange film Sunshine) will work on a rainy day in E15. A week ago, my husband said: "Surprise! We're going to New Orleans. We'll land in Atlanta, meet the boy and drive down to Louisiana. Me: Goodness! Which two weeks? It's those two weeks. Well, there we are. Step away from that scrubbing brush. Take off that pinny. Put down that remote control.