There was another of Alice Bachini's literature-disguised-as-waffling pieces yesterday that I enjoyed reading, and it is very cultural, under the surface, as it were. She's been tidying her house. Why, she asks herself, has she been tidying her house?

Why do visual aesthetics matter? Well, (for a popular and irrefutable start-off) for the same reason that art, music, beauty, sex and love matter. Because they are pleasing, and enjoyable, and make us happy, and happy people are nicer and better at doing good things and living wonderful lives. If you don't believe me, try putting on a tape of what it's like to have tinnitus all day every day. Or vandalising your possessions with a spray-paint-can and a Stanley knife. Or surrounding yourself only with things you find visually repulsive. The more hours you have to spend in such an environment, the harder it will be for you to get good things done while feeling great. Surroundings matter. Beauty makes people feel good.

I tried to write some complicated comments about this, to do with the falling standards of cleanliness of my class, which is the well educated but badly paid and downwardly mobile class and the fights back when it comes to raising its clever children class. But I don't think you can generalise about these (us) people. Some of us became scruffs in hovels, in about 1965, in a sudden puff of dust. I did. But others rose effortlessly out of the detritus in 1978, and have lived lives of effortless cleanliness ever since.

I do think, however, that in some minds there is a link between dirt and poverty, and between poverty and virtue. The deduction that follows from that is not hard. That could be a new word: dirtue. And: dirtuous. We've all been in dirtuous houses. Anti-globalisation demos are: dirtuous. Yes, we have a new word clutch.