It all, essentially, comes down to the cutlery basket.
The dishwasher is an extraordinary litmus paper for the human character. To dismiss it derisively as a mere ‘white good’ sounds grammatically unwieldy and suspiciously racist. In the kitchen it is the machine which holds the most prestigious of places and invites (through the sheer simplicity of the principles involved) all to participate in its glorification.
After all, what could be simpler than putting dishes and implements in the racks and baskets specifically designed for them? With the modern dishwasher tablets there is no measuring to be done; there is no mystique; simply place the tablet in the compartment, close the door and switch on. Job done!
Then people wonder why the dishes they placed in a machine specifically designed to clean them appear to come out the said machine dirtier than when they went in.
As the people who ensured that Ghandi lived a simple life always said, “Have you any idea how complex that simplicity is to achieve?” The Rietveld chair, that masterpiece of simple De Stijl design with no complicated joints, takes master craftsmen to build.
The dishwasher is an extraordinary litmus paper for the human character. To dismiss it derisively as a mere ‘white good’ sounds grammatically unwieldy and suspiciously racist. In the kitchen it is the machine which holds the most prestigious of places and invites (through the sheer simplicity of the principles involved) all to participate in its glorification.
After all, what could be simpler than putting dishes and implements in the racks and baskets specifically designed for them? With the modern dishwasher tablets there is no measuring to be done; there is no mystique; simply place the tablet in the compartment, close the door and switch on. Job done!
Then people wonder why the dishes they placed in a machine specifically designed to clean them appear to come out the said machine dirtier than when they went in.
As the people who ensured that Ghandi lived a simple life always said, “Have you any idea how complex that simplicity is to achieve?” The Rietveld chair, that masterpiece of simple De Stijl design with no complicated joints, takes master craftsmen to build.
The only thing that is simple is idiocy: but there again look what a complex novel Dostoyevsky created to describe it!
I am sure that there is somewhere in the world where the water supply is so conducive to the process of cleaning that no matter how slipshod your approach to the dishwasher, the dishes emerge bright and shining.
Our water has so much calcium carbonate in it that I am amazed that it is liquid enough to come out of the taps. Each morning I expect to find the sink looking like a mini version of the caves in Cheddar and it proclaimed to be a World Heritage Site!
When the water does flow it creates domestic chaos inside all machines with which it comes into contact. The inside of the electric kettle looks as though some alchemist has been trying to find the philosopher’s stone though a series of messy experiments and the artificially short life of kitchen machines is limited even further by coatings of mineral fur.
In the soft water of South Wales the use of dishwasher salt is a redundant luxury and a danger for those with high blood pressure! In Catalonia is it an absolute necessity. Rinse agent, which to me always sounded like the ethical alternative to those vicious defoliants used by the Americans in Viet Nam, is the only way to eliminate those vaguely grubby hazes on glasses that come with the simple approach to the dishwasher in this part of Spain.
And the loading! 50% of The Boys of Herne Hill have (or rather ‘has’ – I’m talking about you Stewart!) learned that there is a ‘correct and acceptable’ way to load the dishwasher and a way which brings about the Apocalypse. I remember being horrified at one acquaintance whose approach to putting things in the dishwasher verged on the nihilistically anarchic. He seemed to regard the ‘helpful’ guides of spokes and compartments as mere artistic details whose presence merely added interest to an otherwise bland metallic interior. He scattered dishes and cutlery and pans in a random manner and built up a Heath-Robinson three dimensional jigsaws of detritus encrusted nastiness, then simply closed the door of the machine and turned it on!
Once, while staying in London, I experienced Andrew’s hissed early morning malediction when he discovered that I had placed a dirty coffee cup in the ‘wrong position’ in the machine. I had, heretofore, tended to regard the ‘appropriate’ filling of the machine as a sort of propitiation for the privilege of ownership. The casual construction of heterogeneous heaps in the machine seemed to me to be little short of sacrilege.
It is also salutary to discover how vicious the makers of pots and pans can be. They seem to target those who are too lazy to wash their products by hand and instead use the machine. However you position some pots and pans there is always some commodious nook or cranny which will retain its moisture how ever long and torrid the drying sequence in your machine might be. The water, usually hidden in some cavernous expanse in the handle only makes its presence known as you remove the pot. The water then magically appears and falls all over the dried dishes in the compartment below: wetting them.
But, as I started by saying, the cutlery basket is the key.
The cutlery basket is usually filled with bright and shining metal, sparkling with what looks like pristine newness. But as far as some people are concerned, it may as well not be there. For them it is camouflaged to invisibility. It is simply not there. Who among us has the moral fibre to take out the cutlery basket first and carefully put away all those fiddly little things? There is usually more work in the emptying of one cutlery basket than in emptying the whole of the rest of the machine; especially when you have to place all the pieces the same way around.
How much simpler would it have been in the times of the Old Testament when trying to find the ‘right’ people if instead of asking them to pronounce the word ‘shibboleth’ or watching the way they drank from a river they had simply asked, “What do you take from the dishwasher first?” Just think of the sea-green incorruptibles they would have had if they only chose those who emptied the cutlery basket first.
I am sure that there is somewhere in the world where the water supply is so conducive to the process of cleaning that no matter how slipshod your approach to the dishwasher, the dishes emerge bright and shining.
Our water has so much calcium carbonate in it that I am amazed that it is liquid enough to come out of the taps. Each morning I expect to find the sink looking like a mini version of the caves in Cheddar and it proclaimed to be a World Heritage Site!
When the water does flow it creates domestic chaos inside all machines with which it comes into contact. The inside of the electric kettle looks as though some alchemist has been trying to find the philosopher’s stone though a series of messy experiments and the artificially short life of kitchen machines is limited even further by coatings of mineral fur.
In the soft water of South Wales the use of dishwasher salt is a redundant luxury and a danger for those with high blood pressure! In Catalonia is it an absolute necessity. Rinse agent, which to me always sounded like the ethical alternative to those vicious defoliants used by the Americans in Viet Nam, is the only way to eliminate those vaguely grubby hazes on glasses that come with the simple approach to the dishwasher in this part of Spain.
And the loading! 50% of The Boys of Herne Hill have (or rather ‘has’ – I’m talking about you Stewart!) learned that there is a ‘correct and acceptable’ way to load the dishwasher and a way which brings about the Apocalypse. I remember being horrified at one acquaintance whose approach to putting things in the dishwasher verged on the nihilistically anarchic. He seemed to regard the ‘helpful’ guides of spokes and compartments as mere artistic details whose presence merely added interest to an otherwise bland metallic interior. He scattered dishes and cutlery and pans in a random manner and built up a Heath-Robinson three dimensional jigsaws of detritus encrusted nastiness, then simply closed the door of the machine and turned it on!
Once, while staying in London, I experienced Andrew’s hissed early morning malediction when he discovered that I had placed a dirty coffee cup in the ‘wrong position’ in the machine. I had, heretofore, tended to regard the ‘appropriate’ filling of the machine as a sort of propitiation for the privilege of ownership. The casual construction of heterogeneous heaps in the machine seemed to me to be little short of sacrilege.
It is also salutary to discover how vicious the makers of pots and pans can be. They seem to target those who are too lazy to wash their products by hand and instead use the machine. However you position some pots and pans there is always some commodious nook or cranny which will retain its moisture how ever long and torrid the drying sequence in your machine might be. The water, usually hidden in some cavernous expanse in the handle only makes its presence known as you remove the pot. The water then magically appears and falls all over the dried dishes in the compartment below: wetting them.
But, as I started by saying, the cutlery basket is the key.
The cutlery basket is usually filled with bright and shining metal, sparkling with what looks like pristine newness. But as far as some people are concerned, it may as well not be there. For them it is camouflaged to invisibility. It is simply not there. Who among us has the moral fibre to take out the cutlery basket first and carefully put away all those fiddly little things? There is usually more work in the emptying of one cutlery basket than in emptying the whole of the rest of the machine; especially when you have to place all the pieces the same way around.
How much simpler would it have been in the times of the Old Testament when trying to find the ‘right’ people if instead of asking them to pronounce the word ‘shibboleth’ or watching the way they drank from a river they had simply asked, “What do you take from the dishwasher first?” Just think of the sea-green incorruptibles they would have had if they only chose those who emptied the cutlery basket first.
What an army of puritanical fanatics they could have commanded! Nothing would have stopped them!
Watch and ponder the ways of those close to you as they load and empty the dishwasher: their characters will be as clear as the glasses they retrieve.
Look hard!
Watch and ponder the ways of those close to you as they load and empty the dishwasher: their characters will be as clear as the glasses they retrieve.
Look hard!
No comments:
Post a Comment