Christmas is a bad time for the slack father. He reads with a dyspeptic and suspicious eye the claims of one Cary Cooper, Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at the University of Manchester, that there exists such a thing as Acute Post-Bank Holiday Depression Syndrome. What the slack father has is Acute Post-Bank Holiday Relief syndrome. The pattern of his life, like a photographic negative of normality, involves calm and ordered weekdays but frenetic and exhausting weekends. At this time of year the differences are vividly heightened. In the spirit of the ancient Saturnalia, when authority was inverted and slaves were allowed to flagrantly inconvenience their masters, the au pair has, unreasonably, gone back to her own family for the holidays. Every year one useful labour-saving device decides to die; this year it is the dishwasher. Suddenly there is all this stuff the slack father has to do, much, much more than usual, and he finds he can no longer make irksome chores disappear with the serene and powerful magic of sloth.

The slack father is a shy and peaceable beast, preferring above all else to be left alone, especially at this time of year, but it simply ain’t going to happen. Trusty excuses such as Work and Not Really Feeling Like It no longer hack it. He has to muck in. He now does five per cent of household duties, which may not sound like much to you but represents a five-fold increase on what he normally does. As I write, I notice that I have acquired an ugly blister on my left hand. It can only have developed from unaccustomed exposure to effort; lifting things, I think, probably something to do with the two Big Shops done on consecutive days just prior to Christmas. (The idea was to turn one unimaginably vast and high-pressure shopping trip into two much more manageable ones. Don’t try this at home: what you get is two unimaginably vast and high-pressure shopping trips, and a blister.) Where is your underpaid and semi-traumatised help when you need it most?

It is disturbing how readily one accepts one’s status as an employer. “I have an au pair” is, in its way, even more unforeseeable to the younger mind than “I have a child”. (“I have three children” isn’t something I’d ever imagined I’d be saying either, but there they are.) I remember how my friend Toby once caught me out. It was around the time the minimum wage was coming on stream. He asked me what I thought about it. A nice start, I said, but the rate is insultingly low.

“So remind me,” said my friend, “how much you’re paying the au pair.”

“That’s different,” I said, slamming my glass down, but also quite keen not to air the risible sum we have to be reminded to pay her on Fridays. Nice, middle-class herbivores go strangely Thatcherite around the subject. I recall them getting into a kerfuffle when plans were announced to get the Inland Revenue involved in the traffic of twenty-year old women who mystifyingly presume that au pairing is a good way to learn English. (What, exactly, are they going to learn to say? Phrases like “eat your greens”, “stop that” and, to the parents, “excuse please, where is sugar/bread/my money” pretty much cover everything. “Stop that” also comes in handy with the cheesier kind of male parent. Slack Dad, I should hardly need to stress, does not make passes at the au pair; not only does he simply not have the energy, or as much confidence in his looks as he used to, but he appreciates the value of an extra pair of hands, and will not imperil the smooth running of the house by acting like Chris Evans around Billie Piper.) The thing about au pairs is that they offer an idea of how the middle classes evaded tiresome quotidian demands through every era of humanity except the modern one: they had servants. This is a deeply troubling thought per se for Guardian readers, who are naturally suspicious of hierarchies; but believe me, even if fitting another person into your household is a tight squeeze, it really helps.

We always try to make the au pairs feel part of the family, not so much to make them happy as to crush their individuality beneath a barrage of demands, insults, and bitterly appropriate sarcasm. One fosters familial loyalty by making the newcomer utterly incapable of routine interaction with the external world. The big risk, though, is when the door of the cage swings open. Does the au pair hop away to freedom or return, with a shudder, to the bowl of water, the little pile of lettuce and heap of torn-up newspaper that is now her home? I confess to being worried this time. I scan the skies and pray for her return.