LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 5

How comforting instantly created routine can be!

     I have decided, after my exploratory ‘walk’ around the pool yesterday that my day will start with a ten-minute walk before breakfast.  Before I venture out I will set the robot hoover going and when I come back I will have my cup of tea, my bowl of muesli and sit down and complete the Guardian quick crossword on my mobile phone and, after that is complete, I will change the hoover to mop and send the robot on its way for the second part of the cleaning process.

     As a special domestic treat for myself today, I loaded the dishwasher with dishes that Toni had not put away and also loaded the dryer with clothes left from yesterday in the washing machine and then loaded up the washing machine for its next wash.

     It is now almost time for my next little ‘walklet’ around the pool as I am determined to get in half an hour of mild exercise a day.  And then there is the writing.

     My main blog is up and running again, and I am beginning to feed my poetry blog (smrnewpoems) with description and individual works.  There is also my young adult novel with the working title of The Standings, that has not progressed very far beyond a few notes and scraps of writing, but this incarceration is the ideal time to ‘get a move on’ and put something more substantial down on paper.

     And then there is the Catalan.  I have convinced myself that it is unlikely that my class in Catalan will start up again before September and therefore I have done nothing to compensate for time lost or in the process of being lost.  This is not a logical attitude and Toni’s casual question, “How much Catalan have you done?” yesterday was a needful prod.  I have done something, but not enough to register: you can hardly count passing glances at work completed as actual study!  This would be the perfect time to do the graft that I find so hard with languages except my own!

     And the lino printing.  Apart from the fact that none of Toni’s family knows what I am talking about when I witter on about lino printing, I did, fifty (sic.) years ago find reasonable satisfaction in cutting and printing and I do now have the material to get going again.  And I will.  And furthermore I will post a reproduction of what I produce to show that I have done more than merely write about actions!  I can see that what I am doing here is what I do in my notebook, that is, write little notes to myself to get action rather than words.  We shall see whether it works.

I have now been for my second ‘walklet’ and feel smug and superior – which is good going for a total so far of twenty odd minutes of slow walking, but, following the Rees motto, “Anything is better than nothing.”

To our horror, our noisy reconstructing neighbours returned to the worksite (or the house adjoined to us) and did a few exploratory thumps on wall, ceiling or floor just to let us know that enforced isolation can be made even worse by inconsiderate hammer wielders! 

Is easy good?

 

There is something deeply satisfying hearing the sound of the robot Roomba electric hoover busily bumping its gentle way around the bathroom and bedrooms upstairs as I sit down drinking a cup of tea and typing.  Though not at the same time obviously.

There is a remnant of the Protestant Work Ethic in my guilty sipping that thinks that this division of labour is somehow morally corrupting. 

I know from past experience of that electronic worm screen saver that used to eat its way through the active screen on older generation computers that had been left idle, I knew that a random thingy that goes off in different directions when it hits the edge of the illuminated workspace will actually clear the screen in a far quicker time that you would have expected.  It therefore follows that a robot hoover that does (virtually) the same thing, well, it moves in the same sort of way, will clean a given area just as efficiently.  And this hoover actually has some sort of sensor that ‘notices’ dirt that it is travelling over and does a little circular dance to remove it.  So, this is an efficient and painless way to do a daily cleaning.

It’s that ‘painless’ bit that causes concern.  If it is truly “painless” – and I can hardly make a thing of having to press a single button and empty the dust trap when it is done – then where is the merit in doing it, apart from the cleanliness, of course?  The saving grace of this house is that we live on three floors, with the rooms starting on the first floor, with the ground floor being a space beneath the house to park the car, house the barbecue and also to breed mosquitos.  

Roomba cleans floors, particularly the tiled floors that we have, but what it doesn’t do is stairs.  Or should that have been ‘are’ rather than ‘is’?  Anyway, stairs have to be done in the old-fashioned way with a human holding the hoover.

A three-floor house is not the place to encourage the use of a corded vacuum cleaner and so we have a battery operated one.  This one is actually a Hoover hoover and is light and easily manoeuvrable and therefore encourages use, and a single charge is well able to cope with the quick glancing clean that I give stairs with it.  And it does take physical effort and that allows me to regard the flat floor automatic cleaning as a sort of compensation and therefore something which is acceptable.

That vague guilt feeling is what I always refer to as The TCP Effect.  TCP was the go-to liquid in my childhood that was dabbed on any cuts and grazes to make them better and to protect them from germs.  The important thing about TCP was that it stung – and therefore you knew that it was doing you good.  It also had a strong smell, that I rather liked – but that might well have been by association of a boyhood wound being treated by a concerned mother, so that the aroma became inextricably linked to maternal love.  Or indeed with paternal love, but fathers usually applied TCP in a less gentle way than mothers!  Anyway, the sting of TCP was a sign of progress, something was happening, the germs were being fought and the sting was the tangible feel of the battle.  It is a version of the “No gain without pain” philosophy, there is always a cost to be paid.

It's strange, but I don’t feel the same way about the washing machine.  I can remember my grandmother and indeed my mother using a washboard to clean some clothes!  We later had a cylindrical gas fired washing machine in which clothes looked as though they were being stewed, and I can remember a pair of jointed wooden tongs that were used to get them out.  We had a mangle that I was sometimes encouraged to use.  I was always fascinated to put towels through those rollers and see the squeezed cardboard-like material come out of the other end! 

Eventually we owned a Flatley clothes dryer.  Our first twin tub was greeted with joy, but there was still a deal of work involved washing clothes.  It was only when we moved house and we had a new (one of the first)

Hoover Keymatic machines that the word ‘automatic’ could be applied to a washing machine.  [I have just gone through the paragraph above and removed all the references to the machines being “mother’s” washing machines.  My parents had comparable jobs and, to be fair, the housework was shared, as it had to be with both parents working and a young son coming home from school for his lunch.  I think, at least in my memory, my mother did the lion’s share of the housework, but I can also remember my dad taking his part too!  So, no sexism in the possessives! #menworktoo]

The dishwasher is more debateable.  Ecologically, I am not sure that the one that I own can be justified, especially with the A+++ machines they produce nowadays that wash on a thimbleful of water or something equally remarkable.  It might be lies, but they are comforting lies that I will fully believe when it comes to the time that I need to replace my present machine.

There are some (sad) people of course, who say that hoovering is satisfying and relaxing, but that conjures up memories of the worst excesses of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in my mind, and we all know where books like that didn’t lead!

Having written about this thorny ethical problem and come to few conclusions, I feel strangely happier: writing as moral analgesic. 

Works for me!

Only connect, if you can be bothered.

There is something unacceptably cruel about an unexpectedly delayed dental appointment.

I turned up at midday, on my bike, to be met by blank incomprehension about my check-up that had been arranged almost a year ago.  Eventually my name rang a bell in the receptionist’s mind and she wittered on about not having my telephone number to let me know that circumstances had changed and that my new appointment was for Tuesday of next week.  They do have my telephone number, indeed they have both of them and my address, and my full name and probably my NIA as well - so they could have used the telephone directory or looked me up online.

But people don’t do that nowadays.  If your mobile number or email (which they also have, come to think of it) is not immediately to hand then contact is impossible.  I call it The Full Dishwasher Syndrome.

The FDS is when you cannot fit anything else into the dishwasher and you find that you have one cup left over?  What does one do?  From experience you know that the higgledy-piggaldy approach to randomly piling things together will result in imperfectly washed items that will also have retained water because they have not been placed in their correct, drain-ready position.  Better to leave the extra item to one side so that it can be added to the next load.

Or you could (as you used to) wash and dry it by hand.  A squirt of washing liquid (or a mere drop of the more expensive stuff), some reasonably hot water, a quick brush over, rinse and a fresh tea towel to dry.  But that doesn’t enter one’s mind.  FDS obliterates the idea that washing dishes can be done by hand: the lone, dirty cup becomes A Problem.  “My dishes,” so runs the mantra, “are more hygienically dealt with by the dishwasher.”  The machine is more thorough, it works at higher temperatures than your hands can stand, it produces cleaner results - even as it washes off some decoration and leaves streaks on glasses and fails to remove some stubborn stains.  No matter - dishes are washed in the dishwasher.  It’s a fact.

Just like clothes are washed in the washing machine and dust and loose dirt is picked up by the Hoover and getting to places is by car and . . .

It is only when you consider how your life is lived that you realise that it is very different from the way that your parents lived.

In no way do I consider myself to have had anything other than a comfortable and privileged upbringing, but we did not have an electric record player until I was 10; we didn’t have a fridge until I was 12, which was around the same time as we got our first television; we had an outside loo; our first automatic washing machine was when I started secondary school; dishes were washed by hand; our first telephone had a ‘shared line’; our first motorised transport was a Bonmini three-wheeler. 

 

But this was all in the 1950s where I was the only person in my year in school to have gone on a foreign holiday.  I could safely roller skate down the road because most people did not have any motorised transport of any sort and photographs of the time (B&W) show me in an empty road, with few cars parked.  So-called white goods were only starting to become affordable.  It was the time when you had to apply for a telephone and you had Hobson’s Choice about what you got.  There were just two channels on the television, BBC and ITV. My grandparents’ television had a tiny screen and took an age to ‘warm up’ and faded to a single bright spot when you turned it off - and of course it was black & white, not colour.  I still remember my first viewing of a mobile phone: a large wooden box with a normal handset and rest used by a telephone engineer.

Things have obviously changed and we have many more ‘things’ than we ever used to have.  But our ways of doing things have also changed: our expectations and our approaches.

Which brings me back to my dental appointment.  One way of contacting me failed and, instead of trying another (in this over connected world) they gave up.  Because we do things this way and not in other ways.  After all, they could have written - but when was the last time that you had that sort of communication for a previously arranged appointment.  If you can’t Message it, it is not going to happen.   

O brave new world that has such full stops in it!