Change

Since I am not going to have a new beginning helping the Queen keep rascals off the streets, I am going to have a New Beginning of my own.

I explained this to Mark over coffee this morning.

Actually I said that I was fed up of cleaning the bathroom. Then I thought about this a bit and added that I was also fed up of cleaning the bedrooms, the stairs, the living room and the kitchen.

We considered this, because obviously these are not things that one can just stop doing, otherwise one becomes buried in dog hair, used tissues, dead flies and unwashed socks. Cleaning is a tiresome, but necessary part of life, rather like cutting one’s toenails or eating vegetables. If left neglected the results are a bit gruesome.

After some thoughtful musing, we decided that whilst we could not completely eradicate cleaning from our lives, there were things that we could do to make it all go a bit more smoothly.

We have got an almost completely unused dishwasher.

We never use this because of the colossal running cost of large hot electrical machines, also because some of our pots and dishes, like our china mugs, will spoil in the dishwasher.

I like our mugs. They are Royal Albert and now discontinued. With this in mind we bought some spares, long ago. We can’t use these, because since the line became discontinued, the spares, unused and still in their boxes, are now worth about sixty quid each. This left us with a Mug Dilemma, and obviously what we did was glued the old ones together and saved the spares either to pass on to our children or to cash in when we have a desperate emergency.

Mark pointed out that our in-use mugs are now so worn and glued that the dishwasher won’t really make any difference at this stage. The gilding has worn off the handles where we hold them, and they have become tired. We could, in fact, shove them in the dishwasher every day and they would be just as valueless as they are already.

We thought excitedly that it would be worth the extra cost of the dishwasher to save ourselves a couple of hours spent washing up every day.

Then we started to cast our minds around all of the other things that we don’t like doing.

We are going to take the rugs up. They wrinkle and crease and the dogs chew the corners and they get stuck in the hoover. Hoovering the carpets will be much nicer without them.

Then I thought of something shocking. In our bedroom I have got shelves of pretty things. Over the years I have amassed a large collection of tasteless trinkets, loved by me and ridiculed by everyone else who sees them. There is a tin camel with stick-on plastic diamonds from Blackpool, and a brass singing bowl from Goa, and some painted dishes from Istanbul, and lots and lots more.

I spend an hour dusting these every couple of weeks.

I realised this morning that this adds up to a full day of my life, every single year.

This made me pause for some very profound thought.

There are all sorts of things I could do with a full day of freedom. I could walk up a mountain or swim in the lake or at the very least not bother getting up.

I do not think I like having shelves full of clutter enough to fill my life with cleaning them.

If we take the shelves down we could carefully put everything away either until we can afford a cleaner or until I have got bored with drinking wine and going for walks and fancy doing some polishing.

We think that we will put a mirror there instead, to reflect the light from the window and make the bedroom look bigger.

There are some changes coming.

Have a picture of the Lake District. It isn’t today’s, I took it in October, but I saw it and liked it.

It made me think about going for a walk instead of dusting.