Remarkable isn’t it, how in this prolonged period of nothingness individual days seem so long, but Tuesdays come round with frightening rapidity.
I wonder if many ‘working from home’ or merely confined to it, feel as I do? Perhaps though, they are disciplined, well-organised and conscientious souls? Without structure to the day, my sense of purpose is flabby as an old rubber glove.
Without a framework created by someone other than myself, I will do diddly squat. By nature I’m a creature of pathological idleness, saved from perdition by 35 years reliance on the supportive scaffolding of the education system, when every teaching day was challenging, rewarding and exhausting and at the end of it I came home to clean, cook, rear a child, please a husband, enjoy a vibrant social life and write for radio and this fine newspaper – and all in high heels. In retrospect I’m amazed at myself. Surely I’m entitled to rest upon my well-earned laurels?
It’s not as if I’m entirely idle now. The house is polka-dotted with fluorescent post-its – lists of things to do, stuff to buy, people to write to or ring – all ignored while I address the urgent matter of re-arranging the magnets on the fridge door or assembling an aesthetically pleasing bowl of fruit, rather than removing toast crumbs from the spoon drawer or collecting the washing from the conservatory where it has hung for three days.
These are merely displacement activities. My priorities are all wrong. Unless issued with a schedule of tasks dictated and supervised by others, I have a tendency to flit from one another, never quite completing any. ‘Pootering about’, my mother called it. Excuse me a moment. The postman has just delivered a parcel – a quirky modernist vase, an Easter gift from Daughter Dear. I need to try it out in several different locations to decide where it looks best. Back shortly. Talk among yourselves….
Sorry about that. Where was I? Oh yes – the only thing that’ll galvanise me into panic-stricken action is lockdown being relaxed enough to let anyone into the house. When I lost the Loving Spouse, I got a cleaning lady, my excuse being our brute of a hoover, too heavy for me to cope with. (N.B. Never send a man out unaccompanied to buy a vacuum cleaner.) She arrived with her own hoover and cleaning products. I took refuge in the futility room. She went through the house like a whirlwind leaving everything gleaming and fragrant, exiting in a cloud of Zoflora fumes. I look forward to welcoming her back. Meanwhile I’m pickin’ an’ dabbin’ round with a trug of environmentally-friendly products recommended by Daughter Dear, a demon cleaner, (she didn’t catch it from me) and devotee of Mrs Hinch, who scrubs her kitchen grouting with a toothbrush. I mooch about aimlessly – here a desultory wipe, there a random swipe of Ken Dodd’s tickling stick, (“dust leaps onto its magic rainbow fibres” it says on the label) Yes, but then you have to batter it clean against the backyard wall.
My chief nightmare is changing the bed linen. I’m a small person of weak resolve. The bed is king size. I rupture myself wrestling with the four tight corners of the mattress cover and undersheet. I pummel pillows into their cases till my arms ache. Then I tackle the king size duvet and its cover, an acre in area. Every trick in the bedmaking book has been told to me. None of them work. I’m purple with frustration and despair and seriously tempted to buy a sleeping bag and just lay it on top of the mattress.
They say the ‘cleaning gene’ skips a generation. I’m glad it was mine. I open the sideboard to my modest inheritance of dusty china, dull crystal and tarnished silver thinking, “I’ll do it – but not today.” Alternatively, I’ll leave it in my will to Daughter Dear.
However, I’m not entirely lacking in integrity. Today, my sole motivation is meeting a deadline. Better get a move on and write something, otherwise you, Dear Reader will be looking at a blank page.
