Cleaning Up My Act

[poliphilo]

I dust the model village and its inhabitants with a little, retractable brush that came out of Ailz's make-up bag.  The dust curls away like smoke, vanishing into the air to settle someplace else. That was always my objection to housework; you only ever move the gunk around; it's a treadmill you never get off.

A bit like life, in fact.

Life as housework. Keeping the dust at bay- the dust to which we shall all return.

Brrrrrrr......

I was never a great one for housework- and it's not just because I'm a bloke. My three primary female role models- my mother and two grandmothers- were exactly the same. As middle-class, mid-century women they used to pay people (poorer women) to do it for them.

And then there's the Bohemian thing. How very bourgeois it is to care about appearances- and what the neighbours think. Dirt and dust are real. Like sex, like death. Embrace them all! 

But, I don't know, I seem to be changing. These past few weeks I've taken to carrying a duster in my pocket.  Now, if I find myself at a loose end, I can whip it out and drag it across surfaces. The dust is encroaching and will win in the end- but I intend to go down fighting. Non passeran!

We have friends from church coming to tea this afternoon and I have been tidying, dusting- even mopping floors. And because these are  friends from church I have temporarily purged the model village of its "figures of an erotic nature". (Check 'em out here.)  I lift the little, naked people out of  the castle keep,  tickle them all over  with the retractable make-up brush and put them away in a cupboard.  The dust swirls and disappears. Does this make me a hypocrite?

Comments

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, the judicious use of Pledge, Mr Sheen, or swiffers will collect the grime on your duster rather than disperse it back around the room.

My family was made up of those poorer people who were paid to do someone else's cleaning, but they were still demons for shifting dirt in their Northumbrian pit village homes. When you have no money, they way you buy respectability in the community is to send your husband to work with clean collars (if frayed) and to scrub and whiten your front doorstep. I guess there was stuff you whitened it with but I can't remember what.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Ailz talks about having to whiten the front step with something called a "donkey stone" when she was a kid. Apparently rag and bone men used to hand out donkey stones in return for scrap.

I've never seen a donkey stone- and I've no idea how they worked.