Take care of the little things

That well adjusted friendly madman, William Blake, wrote that you can see “a world in a grain of sand.” Let’s assume that he hadn’t been at the laudanum (so he wasn’t having a Salvador Dali moment) and that he was actually saying something with the clarity of his humanist vision in the simplest and most direct way he could. Perhaps he would have been sympathetic with the title of Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things (1997).

I’m sure that William would have been joyously enthusiastic to endorse the sentiment which led to the title – though I’m sure he would have interpreted it in a more than individualistic way.

In some ways it is an unsettling observation: if something as inconsequential as a grain of sand can effortlessly contain a world, then why is it necessary to strive to create something infinitely more complex like the intricate painting on a roof in a chapel in a very small city? Was Michelangelo wasting his time completing all that back breaking illustration when the smallest particle of his paint pigment could, apparently, have contained all of his artistic vision and much more?

Blake himself completed drawings, paintings and prints, but I suppose that many of them (all of them?) are imbued with his own mystical appreciation of the world around him, so he never produces a prosaic representation of the world, but indicates the numinous in the quotidian.

In fact in a painting like his depiction of Newton at the bottom of the ocean he consciously rejects the attempts to circumscribe Nature by Science. Nature, according to Blake, can only be truly appreciated by much more than the intellect, hence the way in which he paints and writes.

It is now either an anti climax or a complete justification of the sentiments of Blake that I reveal that the inspiration for the preceding piece of writing is something tiny and domestic.
White sinks in the kitchen obviously look more stylish than clunky old stainless steel ones, but they do demand a more rigorous regimen of cleaning than a swirl of water which cleans the metal version. Bleach and soaking is necessary for the pristine whiteness to shine.

It reminds me of the disastrous plain red carpet in my parents’ house which covered the floor of the hallway and the stairs. A wonderful choice of carpet if you live a light footed singular life, but not the sort of carpet which lends itself to everyday life if you have a family and, more importantly, a molting yellow Labrador who liked to sleep in the sun on the red carpet in the hallway!

Constant hoovering would have preserved its integrity, but as Shirley Conran remarked about stuffing mushrooms, life is just too short. For moments after hoovering the carpet looked superb and then the dog would meander out into the hallway and collapse and shiggle about leaving a yellow haired impression on the now grubby carpet. They eventually got rid of the plain red and bought a multi coloured modern carpet which showed nothing until you got a shovel and dropped the dirt on it in conspicuous piles!

Back to the sink. I had run out of bleach and so took whatever was to hand and splooshed it with reckless abandon in the optimistic hope that quantity would obviate the necessity for specific directed work.

It was what I used that caused me to think. The cleaning liquid (courtesy of ‘Flash’) was truly and startlingly fluorescent! It looked like liquid yellow light – and smelled of lemons. It was so distinctive that I actually stopped cleaning (not difficult for me) and watched as it dripped down the draining board and formed fiery rivulets of light slipping down the plug hole. How in the name of god does yellow fluorescence equate with cleanliness? My alternative cleansing liquid was gel with a wild orchid scent. I could have used wipes with orange zest. Who decides the flavours of clean? And why are we so conservative about the selection of what sprays from the nozzles of our cleaning bottles?

I think that Dettol should be produced with the scent of fine Rioja. After all, we are not so naïf that we actually think that anything natural has produced the scent in the cleansing material. And we constantly see the good and the great sniffing fine old wines, so it must be a positive fragrance. It’s all just a factory produced amalgam of chemicals which tickle our olfactory organs in exactly the right way, and our wonderful scientists can produce the scent of anything. So why not Chardonnay table polish – at least the factory version would never go off, it could preserve that ‘just opened’ fragrance to give personality to the home. Why not espresso scented window cleaner? Mown grass toilet paper? Supple hide toilet cleanser? Burnt wood car freshener? The possibilities are endless and so much more interesting than the present pedestrian alternatives.

I think that by their disinfectants may ye know them. The way that a society defines ‘clean’ probably says more about it than the arid impenetrability of economic statistics and descriptions of political institutions.

What percentage of dead germs is acceptable? If a liquid kills 99% of germs, what about the other 1%? If everything else dies then doesn’t that give an incentive for the other one percent to flourish and multiply and take over the world? Perhaps it would be safer to leave a few more percent of germs alive so that they can form antagonistic groups and keep their numbers down by natural selection. Who knows what harm we are doing by upsetting the natural ecosystems of germkind with our thoughtless decimation (times 9) of their delicate hierarchical organisations?

It is said that there are more germs on a kitchen table than on the top of your toilet. What does this mean?

I think it probably says more about the fanatical British abhorrence of bodily functions and our natural revulsion to bodily waste resulting in a demented determination to eradicate all sights and smells and microbes and anything else associated with defecation than with the dirtiness of the kitchen table. All things are, after all, relative.

We should never ignore the small scented secrets of a sweet smelling style of survival!