Housewifely

I am tidying up in preparation for having visitors.

Of course it is not just because we are having visitors, because I don’t really imagine that they will go upstairs and be horrified by the fluff under Oliver’s bed.

I suppose it is really because I would like to spend my life living in a beautiful hotel with gleaming bath taps, and since I am perfectly well aware that this is an unlikely outcome of my adventures, every now and again I try and turn my house into one.

Obviously it would also be nice if our visitors thought: “goodness me, how like a beautiful hotel this house is,” but I am aware that this is also an unlikely outcome and actually I would be more than happy with the opinion of the visitors if they didn’t go away wondering how they could tactfully ask school to discourage their daughter from being friends with the pikey child from Windermere.

With all of this in mind, but also because the house had once again filled itself with horrible floating bits of grey fluff made of a nasty mixture of bits of dead skin and dog hair and ash from the fire, I have been cleaning.

I had to start off by washing the sheets from our bed. It is actually only a few days since I last did this but the dogs have become leaky and malodorous. They have not been allowed on the bed without a towel underneath them, but nevertheless I have still developed the beginnings of a dog related obsessive-compulsive disorder. They bounded happily on the bed to greet us this morning, smelling of garden and one another, which is all very romantic but rather repellent, and when we got out of bed we took the sheets along with us and shoved them in the washing machine.

I didn’t mind much really, because it was a chance to try out the new batch of laundry soap, and also to experiment with Reckitt’s Blue in the rinsing water, which in the event turned out really rather well.

My own home made laundry soap makes things feel really very lovely indeed but does not have what manufacturers of proper soap powder call ‘optical brighteners’. This is stuff that they add to laundry soap in a factory which during the washing process makes white things look virtuously gleaming whitely white, in order that the neighbours envy the contents of your washing line when they go past on their way to the Co-op. Without it after a while everything loses its shiny look and eventually starts to look a bit faded and yellow.

I don’t actually know what an optical brightener is, and so my chances of reproducing this particular element of real soap powder are limited. Therefore I have purchased a substance which was presumably more popular in the days of dolly tubs and mangles, called Reckitt’s Blue. This is a rather pleasing powdery lump of something blue. It comes wrapped in paper and puts me vaguely in mind of school trips to museums.

The idea behind this is that, rather counter to expectation, if you add a bit of blue dye to the final rinse, it gives white things a slightly blueish look, which makes you imagine that they are really white.

I was suspicious of this, because to date my experience of anything blue in the boil wash is that it makes everything go a depressing grey colour. This does not make me imagine that anything is white in the least, but puts me in mind of the skin colour popular in Oliver’s zombie games. Try boiling a pair of jeans along with your nice white sheets and you will understand what I mean.

However it appeared that the cube of blue powder, scraped into hot water and added into the final rinse, did not make things look the colour of recently-risen corpses at all. In fact I can vouch for all my sheets and teatowels having taken on the enviable brilliance of fresh snow.

What handy housewifely hints can be had from these pages.

The sheets also took on some actual fresh snow, to my annoyance, when I was playing the washing game with the Weather Gods in the garden afterwards, and got distracted.

However I am pleased to say that we have now got beautifully white clean sheets, which will be splendid for when we have visitors at weekend.

I don’t imagine for a minute that they will see them. What matters is that I will know in my inner soul that I can hold my head up proudly, in the assurance that I am a virtuous housewife and not at all a shameful degenerate.

All I need to do now is clean the rest of the house, tidy the garden, cook an ace dinner and persuade Number Two Daughter to buzz off with the dogs.

No problem.

The picture, if you can see it, is my latest soap.