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!

Here we go again!

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Back to school after the holidays!

That statement is both true and misleading. 

It’s true that I did go to ‘school’, or rather a place of education for those beyond the normal years of childhood - which is another way of saying that I am getting Spanish lessons in an Adult Education Centre, though it also appears to have near school age pupils too.  Confusingly.  However, there I go, which brings me to the misleading part.  My present day schooling is only twice a week for two hours - rather different from my previous experience as pupil or teacher!

I might add that the level of Spanish that I am supposed to be doing means that four hours a week is more than enough for my brain to take in.

In a direct proof of the existence of the ‘hand of god’ element in my life, I somehow managed to pass last year’s course and that ‘success’ was used as a direct threat-and-proof by my teacher, so I reluctantly signed on for the higher level course this year.

My horror has been compounded week-on week by the explosion of fiendish verb tenses to which we have been introduced and which stubbornly refuse to stay in my memory.  Of course, mere lack of knowledge does not stop my chattering away in class, ignoring the greying, haggard faces that have to make sense of my enthusiastic but ungrammatical exposition in Spanish!  But there will come a time when surface loquacity will have to pass an exam, a written exam, and smiling-faced gibbering in roughly approximate Spanish will not be enough - or even acceptable.

This year, I have therefore decided, will be the Year of the Verb (YOTV) [And you could read that acronym in Spanish as ‘I Television’, he typed irrelevantly] and I have therefore been vaguely busy in trying to rationalise my learning.

I purchased (and have very rarely used) a sort of book/bible called, imaginatively, “501 Spanish Verbs” that, unsurprisingly contains 501 Spanish Verbs fully conjugated!  Who would have thought!  But wait, that is not all.  There is much, much more - none of which you would find remotely interesting unless you are engaged in the study of the language.  If you are, then this book is indispensable.  Truly.

And it is going to be the key to my groping way towards Spanish verbal acceptability.  The idea is to photocopy part of the introduction that gives a clear and understandable guide to The Seven Simple Tenses and The Seven Not So Simple (Compound) Tenses with a Mood (Imperative) and use these pages as my Daily Readings.  In this way, I am fondly hoping that mere looking will allow the grammatical delights to seep their ways into my brain and become something that I can actually use with something approaching proficiency.

This introduction also tempts with a glimpse of the forbidden pleasures of The Future Subjunctive and the Future Perfect Subjunctive. It says, “The future subjunctive and the future perfect subjunctive exist in Spanish, but there are rarely used” and that is a good enough excuse to ignore them completely, even if I actually knew what they were!

All displaced persons keep referencing their distant homes, and all I want to be able to do is say, with confidence, in Spanish: “When I was living in Cardiff” or “When I used to play badminton in the Eastern Leisure Centre” or “Having been educated in Swansea University” or “I am thinking about taking another course in the Open University in the next few years” or simply “When I was younger” etc.  As well as dreaming about saying, in Spanish something like, “If I had known what it would have been like, I possibly might have” etc.  As it is at the moment, I attempt sophisticated verb tenses but end up sounding like a Tarzan figure whom choses random parts of a grammar primer and hopes for the best.  Which is something!

This morning’s lesson played to my strengths.  It started late, didn’t have any new grammar or vocabulary and all of it comprises various students speaking and responding!  The two hours sped by, and the most concerning element in the lesson was worrying about whether the battery pack on my electric bike would last for the homeward journey.

As it happens it did and the pack is now safely recharged and ready for insertion to get me to my swim tomorrow.

One thing that I note is that I used the term ‘worrying’ about whether the battery would last.  Basically, it doesn’t matter.  Without a working battery, my electric bike is, well, a bike.  It has seven gears and you pedal.  It’s a bike!  It works with sheer leg power.  But the electric bike is like the dishwasher.  I am tempted to let that last sentence stand alone and not give an explanation, rather in the Lewis Carroll “Why is a raven like a writing desk” (or vice versa) but that would be pointlessly cruel.

A number of times I have started the dishwasher and then found a cup or plate that should have been included.  Now, you have to stay with me here, as I did not discover that you could open up the dishwasher and insert something part way through the cycle.  And that knowledge was based on the very first dishwasher I owned where I assumed that breaking the cycle would not pose a problem, and flooded the kitchen!  I know that with water saving and eco-cycles the amount of water used is minimal, but that is not the point.  I would see the lone cup and think, “Damn!  If I had found that a few minutes earlier it could have gone in the wash and now it will just have to wait for the next load.”  What I didn’t think was, “Oh well, I’ll wash it in the sink and dry it with the tea towel.”

As a bike without a battery is still a bike, so a cup can be washed by hand rather than by a machine.

Then I started thinking of other statements that I know that I have made at some point or other whose link to reality is sometimes questionable:

“The hoover is not fully charged, I can’t clean.”

“I’m not going to the shops because it’s raining.”

“I didn't contact you because I mislaid my mobile phone."

"I am wearing this shirt because I do not have any others."

"I bought it because I needed it."

"We have nothing in the house to eat."

"You can never own too many tea spoons."

And I think I better stop there as perhaps I am giving too much away!

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