I suppose really the day has been a continuation of Monday.
By that I mean that I have got round to doing lots of the things that I was supposed to do on Monday but didn’t. Actually I should have done most of them last week, but didn’t, and so I am feeling smugly virtuous and pleased with myself.
You will be pleased to hear that I have finally unpacked the suitcase which we brought back with us from Cambridge. I managed to haul this all the way up the stairs to the attic last week, where I can’t see it, so obviously I forgot all about it, instantly and completely.
When I looked at it today I realised that most of the things still in it didn’t need to be in the attic at all but should have been carefully unpacked on our floor, by which I mean floor as in hotel lift, not floor of the sort occupied by the dogs and everybody’s discarded shoes. Our house has four floors, which is a nuisance when the top ones need hoovering, and so I don’t do it very often. This shows, especially in the loft which has a cream carpet, although it is not as bad as it could be because the dogs are not allowed up there.
It took me two trips to lug everything back down the stairs again, which made me think that there is no point in being too conscientious about things, I could have saved myself a good deal of effort if only I had just left it in the conservatory in the first place.
I was dismayed to find that I had left two sets of shirts and trousers in it at the bottom. They had been under a pile of jerseys for the last fortnight, and were sadly creased.
I dragged them out grumpily, because of already having a massive untouched pile of ironing, and then had a brainwave. I remembered that once, long ago, I had purchased a bottle of some stuff which promised that you could take it on holiday with you, spray everything with it when you took it out of the case, and the creases would just fall out, presumably in a heap on the floor.
I have never used this because of assuming that it was probably just snake oil, or at the very least, distilled water, but I thought that probably I had nothing to lose, and dug it out.
Readers, to my complete surprise, it actually worked.
I don’t mean that it could be used instead of ironing, obviously the cologne-scented crisp freshness that you get with newly-ironed clothes does not come in a squirty bottle, but for clothes that had once been ironed, and which had become inconveniently crumpled, it worked magnificently.
I thought it was at least as good as the last hotel de-creasing that I tried, which I learned from somebody’s biography of Freddie Mercury, and which also works, which is that you put your trousers underneath the mattress before you go to bed. When you wake up in the morning they are effortlessly flat.
These pages are often full of these handy household tips, I hope you are remembering them.
I was so pleased with myself that I did some ironing as well. I did not do very much, because, well, because it is ironing and I had got to an interesting bit in my story. All the same I have made a start, and I feel that I have merited a Gold Star of the sort that used to be dished out to Ritalin Boy whenever he managed a whole day without doing a wee in his trousers.
Better still, I have cleaned the children’s floor, in both senses of the word floor, because I have hoovered and made up their beds. The day has involved a very lot of dashing up and down the stairs, mostly carrying things, and I am feeling exhausted in that satisfied sort of way that you get when you know that your house is orderly and respectable.
I still haven’t finished the ironing, but it is in the attic and so I don’t need to think about it.
