Coat hooks

I apologise in advance for another entry where Nothing Much Happened.

That isn’t entirely true. We have been doing more creative things to our new coat-hanging structure. 

In fact I have been doing things to it.

I got cross with Mark the other day and said that it was not fair that he gets to do all of the interesting creative stuff with power tools and I am allowed to tidy up afterwards.

Today I borrowed his electric screwdriver and he cleaned the bathroom.

Neither of us like cleaning the bathroom. 

In the long-passed Olden Days, before I had even met him, I never cleaned the bathroom. I had a housekeeper. 

She did all of the cleaning and the ironing and the shopping. I did not pay her a million pounds a week, but she deserved it. 

It was especially brilliant because she was of the sort of religious bent which inclined her to believe that she was scrubbing the wickedness out of our house.

We were terribly wicked. Everywhere always smelled of bleach.

Of all of the sacrifices I have had to make for school fees, that one is my most-regretted. When I was not at work I spent all of my spare time doing things that I liked, like planting things in the garden and keeping bees. Life is much better when you do not have to spend any of it tugging horrible slimy tufts of hair out of plugholes. 

I did not have to do this today. Mark cleaned the bathroom, although I suspect he might not have given the plughole a very thorough investigation. 

I put coat hooks up in our new cupboard.

I was allowed to do this because it is not terribly technical. I am not too bad at things which don’t involve centimetres and spirit levels.

There was a lot of thinking all the same. I had got to think about which things we used most, and where I could put them so that we can reach them easily.

It was a good job I did this bit really. If I leave that sort of thinking up to Mark he tends to put things where he can reach them easily, which on average is about a foot higher than I can reach.

He lifted me up once so that I could see what the world looked like from his point of view. It made me realise that I only dust as high as my own eye level. He can see on to lots of places, like the top of the fridge, where I have never bothered cleaning at all.

I said that if he wanted them to be clean he could always clean them himself, but he didn’t. Sometimes I think that he hardly cares at all about dusty shelves.

The cupboard is almost finished. Tomorrow I will be able to collect coats and shoes from all over the house and hang them tidily inside it. I could have done that today, but lots of things are in the loft. There are three flights of stairs up to the loft, and I was too idle.

When he had finished cleaning the bathroom Mark made appropriate admiring noises about how wonderfully the coat hooks had been attached to the wall. This is an important part of your job when you are the person who is cleaning the bathroom and not using the power drill.

He might even have meant it, because so far he has not secretly taken a single one down and re-hung it properly. He does this with my DIY when he thinks I am not looking.

Instead we got ready for work, which is where I am now.

It is silent-January quiet. I am going to go away and read my book.