The sharing of household chores has been an unresolved problem since Adam and Eve first set up home together. It used to be that married couples fell out over who did the dishes – who washed, who dried, who lay on the sofa promising to “do them after the news”.
A perpetual bone of contention was, whether the husband washed or dried, he didn't do either properly and, worse than that, despite knowing where everything belonged, never put any of it away.
'Plus ça change' as they say. Who knew that the loading of a dishwasher can be a deal breaker in marriage? Apparently, 40 per cent of couples fight over the correct way to load a dishwasher and 60 per cent argue about whether the dishes need rinsing beforehand. Small comfort to discover we were mere statistics and didn't suffer alone.
Not that the Loving Spouse and I ever uttered a contentious word to each other on the subject, for that way madness and marital breakdown lay. Our silent battle of wills was conducted daily for thirty years through a Hotpoint, then an Electrolux and finally a Bosch dishwasher.
He refused to put saucepans or casserole dishes in on the grounds they took up too much space, (the point of having a dishwasher being, you don't have to stand at a sink scouring off scrambled egg or lasagne crust obviously escaping him). Also, he'd rinse every item thoroughly before stowing it and placed knives and forks pointy ends upwards in the cutlery basket so the unwary could get a nasty jab by accident. Daughter Dear and I gave plates a sketchy scrape, put the cutlery in with handles up and as many saucepans as feasible. Thus were the battle-lines drawn and our lives measured in surreptitious forays to the kitchen to re-arrange the dishwasher's load, only to find on the return visit the re-arrangement re-arranged. Oblique reference was sometimes unavoidably made to its contents. “Don't turn on the dishwasher yet. There's still room in it,” he'd say. “But we've no clean teaspoons/knives/mugs”, I'd say. Guardedly, he'd extract one of the required items, wash and dry it carefully and present it like a waiter. There were times I thought it'd be worth the court case....
Things came to a head the day I opened the three-week-old Bosch to discover its grey bottom rack had turned white overnight. It was time to speak out. “Would you like to explain this?” I asked. “The original bottom rack is badly designed”, he said tersely. “It doesn't hold enough. I replaced it with the rack from our old Electrolux in the garage”. “But it's a different colour”, I said diffidently. “And your point is...?” he said and stalked off. Well, the point is, it comes off its runners when I put it forward and skews dangerously to one side but, discretion being the better part of valour, four years on I've got the hang of it.
As we become progressively more prosperous and more people acquire dishwashers, you'd think that would put an end to women’s misery. This is a sad delusion. It's merely a change of tactics on the same battlefield with no dilution of bitterness, for now, stacking the dishwasher and emptying the dishwasher are daily flashpoints. Women treat loading the dishwasher as a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle – a place for everything, everything in its place. Men stick things in haphazardly, then attempt to cram the surplus items into the irregular gaps between until the machine's overloaded and sticking-up things interfere with the rotors. The wash cycle proceeds with the regular 'klonk, klonk, klonk' of the rotor blades beating the daylights out of the good Denby dinner plates.
As for unpacking the dishwasher and putting stuff away? I think, dear reader, we've come full circle. Some people develop the slovenly practice of taking out of the dishwasher only what they immediately need. The consequence is, that other people without their glasses on put dirty items in among the clean. It's only a matter of time that habits like these will be accepted as legitimate pleas for divorce, on the grounds of unreasonable conduct and mental cruelty.
for publication TUESDAY JULY 21st 2015
