We have been cleaning.
I refer you back to yesterday’s post, where I described that I dug the flowerbed out despite not wanting to bother. I am sorry to report that I felt exactly the same today about cleaning.
I am coming to self knowledge due to the collapse of civilisation.
In my inner soul I am absolutely bone idle.
Mark kindly cleaned the bathroom. I was grateful for this, because it is my least favourite job, and did not mind in the least that he forgot the loo. I did that afterwards, and did not even mention it, which I thought demonstrated great self-restraint.
This was partly because he becomes grumpy when I come and look whilst he is cleaning things. I am quite often helpful by explaining how he could do it better.
I think it is unreasonable of him to complain about this, we should all be open to advice and constructive criticism, and I don’t know why he never notices that the taps need to be polished anyway.
The children were supposed to clean their own bathrooms and bedrooms. I do not know if they did this, because I did not check. I do not have to look at their taps and so will not mind if they are not polished. They will have to live with this themselves.
I cleared out our shirt drawer. This was another job that has been squatting menacingly on my list of unwelcome chores. It was bursting at the seams, and since the good weather has arrived, I have discovered that there were some shirts in there that were actually too scruffy to be pegged out on the washing line.
Obviously we have still been wearing them. It does not matter what a shirt looks like when it is underneath a jersey.
I sorted them into three groups.
The first pile was for the truly scruffy, the torn ones with the frayed cuffs and collars, and splashes of paint and welding burns. I extricated these and cut them up for dusters. One of them was so worn it would not even have made much of a duster. I have saved that for the next time the dog is sick.
I saved the buttons in my button jar, there’s a war on, you know.
The second pile was the pile of the moderately acceptable, the shirts that should not be worn for cutting firewood or bleaching the bathroom. These were shirts that could reasonably be worn to go into Kendal, acceptable enough to stop store detectives from following you around, or to permit sitting at a cafe without waitresses looking anxious and trying to put you at a table out of sight at the back.
I downgraded most of these to be considered scruffy.
Some of them might have been a bit scruffy anyway.
The third pile was sensibly respectable shirts, the sort that could be worn to collect Oliver from Gordonstoun.
I wanted to add some more respectable going-out options to that sentence, but could not think of anywhere else respectable that we might actually go.
I have not downgraded these. These are still too respectable to be worn by me most of the time, and Mark only has to put his arms into the sleeves of a shirt for it to degenerate into an oily rag.
I thought that it did not matter about not having a middle respectable pile, because we are not likely to be going anywhere for the foreseeable future anyway. We can’t go out whilst the world is socially distanced, and afterwards we won’t have any money to go shopping in Kendal anyway, and so we will just have to stay at home, where scruffy shirts will do just splendidly.
Of course none of this takes into account our smart shirts. Smart shirts do not live with the other hoi polloi in the drawer.
Smart shirts, for carol services or sports days or speech days and other such upmarket events, live in the wardrobe, pressed neatly and hung in plastic bags, to make sure our general daily grub does not rub off and they are pristine and wonderful when a Smart Event arises. We do not even touch these if we can avoid it. They are in an elite class apart and I am not thinking about them at the moment.
There will not be a Sports Day this year.
Mark took the hoover apart to find out why it was not working properly. It has kept overheating.
He discovered that when you switch it on the electricity created a small but fairly dramatic fire inside the motor. He showed me this phenomenon and said that he did not think I should continue to use it, so he discarded it and has ordered a new motor. It would appear that you can still get new motors for hoovers. I hope it does not mean that there will be one less for a ventilator.
I do not like cleaning when I have got a hoover, even an excitingly incendiary one. I like it even less when everywhere has to be swept.
It is a jolly good thing that the dogs have had a haircut.
Have a picture of Mark concentrating very hard on a hoover.
