Particular

I have had a day of feeling gloomy.

It was raining hard, with occasional bursts of hailstones, and I did not at all want to go out, not even to the farm for more firewood. I sloped around the house, feeling housebound and fed up.

I was so gloomy by this afternoon that I decided that the best thing I could possibly do would be to dust the dresser and wash down the china.

Since I was gloomy anyway it could not possibly make things worse.

I am embarrassed to tell you that the last time I did this was when I was getting ready to put up the Christmas decorations, in November.

It is now March, as I am sure you have noticed.

Not only has it been months and months since the last cleaning operations, they are, from a domestic point of view, the dustiest months of the year.

Between November and March you can count the number of times the doors are thrown open to admit the restorative gusts of cleansing Lakeland air, on the fingers of one hand, assuming that you were so boringly inclined and bothered keeping score.

I have not bothered keeping score, so in fact that is a guess. I do not have any idea at all how often we have left the door open, only that is is not very often at all. It has been a long and chilly winter. Warm and musty is much nicer.

Not only have we not been opening the door, as discussed above, also we have kept the fire lit at all times. In consequence, it has been pumping out a steady stream of what the august Daily Telegraph recently referred to as minuscule airborne particles, which could, it warned ominously, quite possibly become a threat to health if they happened to be inhaled by unwary householders.

This is part of the current campaign to make log burning fires illegal, and was revealed with an air of surprise, as though we might not have noticed that wood fires equal dust and smoke.

I do not like dusting very much, but I do not want my fire to be made illegal, imagine how terrible it would be not to have to spend all of our spare time splitting up logs and then walking sawdust all over the carpets. The fire is the most important thing in the house, and a renewably-resourced electric fan heater simply couldn’t compete.

In any case, trees are renewable, usually for £29.99 in a medium sized pot on the mighty Internet.

Anyway, to return to the matter in hand. We have just had the dustiest, least aired-out months of the year, and during that time I had not wiped the dresser down on one single occasion.

When I looked at the champagne glasses, which have not had a great deal of use during this impoverished and not especially celebratory year, they were so dusty that they had become opaque.

I boiled the kettles on our dust-exhaling stove, and filled the washing-up bowl with hot water.

I took everything off, a few bits at a time, and washed it all, carefully.

It took ages. It is a slow process because I keep all of my best china on the dresser. This is the stuff that I don’t ever even use when we have got smart guests because it is being saved for the day when the Queen pops round. Prince William would also qualify, although I am sorry to say that Prince Harry could buzz off now. He could have the not-matching-very-much stuff with Winnie the Pooh on it like all the rest of us.

In fact it turned out to be quite soothing. It was rather nice to wash and rinse, and see the warm sparkle restored to everything. I polished the spoons and rubbed the dresser down with beeswax and felt it sigh comfortably under the cloth.

It is done now, and I have just had the satisfying recollection that I could probably leave it all completely untouched until it needs doing again in July.

Unless, of course, the Queen pops in.