What a Chore

 As the chaos of a primary school harvest festival erupts around us, children adorned with fruit and vegetable head-dresses scurry down the aisle and baffled parents are ejected from seats because of someone’s inadequate mental arithmetic. We, the seatless ones, form a ragged crowd around a font bedecked with walnuts and tired-looking grapes, waiting until every impatient posterior is seated correctly and the microphones are plugged in. Out come the mobile phones.

 “This is ‘Crumbs’, explains Fellow-Mum, scrolling through a collection of shots she’s taken of the spectacular mess and chaos her husband is wont to leave around the house. “That one’s ‘Wire’,” she says of a tangle of cable that resembles a crane’s nest. “And that,” -- I can just about make out a bed beneath a jumble of clothes and accessories – “well, for now it’s ‘Untitled I’.”

She sighs. “I’ve got loads of them, Val. It just makes me feel better,” she says.  “But I’m thinking of setting up a Tumblr account or something, so other women can join in.”

I urge her to go ahead with her homage to the slovenly husbands of the world and their eye-rolling spouses. I have a feeling that she’ll be in good company. And, as if to qualify my suspicion, the first thing I see when I open up my laptop at home is an article in the Guardian about housework, and who actually does it . 

Clearly it’s a bone of contention, even between the apparently enlightened and intellectual families behind some of the most middle-class front doors in London. And, for anyone who has felt intimidated by the Cath Kidston/Pip Studio/Orla Kiely standards of household beauty, it is reassuring to know.

Are you more Pip Studio or ...

…Tracey Emin?

But here I must interject with an admission – just in case you are assuming that I too am plagued by a careless, slovenly mate and wish to purge myself of my exasperation.  The truth is I have far more in common with Hannah Marriot and her blind spot for overflowing bins and laundry baskets. My particular omission is the stovetop – no wait, the sink. Or is it the work surfaces? Make it the whole kitchen.

Is it nature or nurture? Is my partner’s allergy to all things greasy, sticky and crumby derived from his no-nonsense rota-wielding mother, or does it go deeper?

Amongst my friends who naturally eshew housework, there is talk of ‘dyspraxia’ a form of mentality where a lack of spacial awareness, an inability to grasp process, means we simply don’t see the mess, aren’t aware of the decimation left in our wake, and cannot make anything as simple as an omelette without breaking the eggs, smearing every surface with yoke, splattering oil up the walls and leaving the shattered debris in a fall-out zone of pans and dishes.

Of course, I could choose to allocate some responsibility for my failings to my upbringing. I recall the shock I felt when, at 14 years old, I was told to clean the sink following a domestic science class. “Clean the sink?” I had never witnessed anyone undertake such a task. Surely the act of running the tap makes it a self-cleaning appliance?

Matter!

As for vacuuming, my mother lived in mortal fear that cleaning the carpet would render it bald - far better for it to be strewn with bits and replete with dust than slightly threadbare. Having now lived with wooden floors, which seem to actively breed dust bunnies of prehistoric proportions, I see now that a carpet can also be regarded as a self-cleaning organism (all be it one that induced an asthma attack when my brother was misguided enough to stay overnight at Mother’s).  But, as convincing as these arguments may seem, my sister’s own scrupulously clean domestic environment puts pay to my feeble attempt to avoid blame for my own domestic negligence.

The Woman's Hour and Mumsnet surveys may have set out to show the significant gender bias that exists in the arena of household tasks, but The Guardian article illustrates how, gender aside, domestic labour division is still, in 2014, entrenched in an Odd Couple scenario of tidy Felix Ungers versus slovenly Oscar Madisons exchanging recriminations over piles of laundry and dirty dishes. 

Perhaps the bitterness arises when we interpret an act of domestic neglect as a figurative up-yours; an affront to our attempts to manage the chaos of life. Or maybe it’s all down to how we fail to communicate with each other, and  end up brooding over a perceived insult that was never intended. Take my favourite quote from The Odd Couple as an example :

Oscar Madison: “I cannot stand little notes on my pillow! We are all out of cornflakes, F.U.? It took me three hours to figure out F.U. was Felix Unger."

Chucking Out Time

A fever seems to be raging as Freshers’ Week kicks off and all the children are finally in school. On every street it seems family saloons are being crammed with bulging cardboard boxes, household linens, broken Dysons and trips to the charity shops and the local dump are on everybody’s schedule.

I’m not immune. Perhaps more than in spring, the clear out beckons. Low beams of dazzling autumn sun make it impossible to ignore the encroachment of hoarded tat, threadbare spots on the carpet, grubby finger marks on painted surfaces.

And, inexorably, Christmas is coming, hand in hand with its incipient anxiety. Not just the exhortation to get more stuff, get more stuff, but just where will we put all the stuff when we get it? Where will we even put the bloody tree?

In our cellar, hands on hips, I stand on the periphery of our accumulation of children’s outgrown toys, DIY paraphernalia, towering piles of discarded boxes, teetering stacks of furniture, and I have to steel myself against the wave of despair that threatens to send me running back up the stairs.

Sternly I rein in my panic and tell myself: “Look. For. Stuff. To. Sell.” I know it has to be here somewhere. The spare chairs, the uncomfortable settee, the impulse purchases from IKEA, the things yet unpacked from our move four years ago - they will do for a start. But as I examine some of them and wonder how I will faithfully describe them to potential buyers, I can’t help thinking I need a new word: ‘family-worn’.

Such a term covers felt-tip pen marks that won’t quite come out, the faded flaws created by a vigorous treatment of Vanish to remove said pen marks, the scratches of an impatient dog, a previous owner’s cat, the scurf of glitter, dust and puckered, gum-less stickers that seems to reappear magically within ten minutes of being vacuumed, the graffiti and the Disney stickers that, without a bottle of white spirit, are definitely here to stay.

Mmmm. How to spin it? Shabby Chic? Good upholstery project? Another term I wish I could use springs to mind – how Japanese women refer to their newly retired husbands getting under their feet: sodai gomi (oversize rubbish – see, it sounds better in Japanese).

I am then struck by a mortal fear: what if I do sell these for a few quid, or donate them, in a few weeks’ time? I could witness them re-upholstered, poised in their designer-distressed distinction in the window of one of the chi-chi boutiques of Lewes, bearing a price tag that will make me simultaneously laugh and weep.

So, there they stay for now.

I start small. The bags and bags of plastic bags, the used margarine/ice cream tubs  - proof that the 21^st Century Green ethos of Reduce, Re-use, Recycle is the perfect storm for producing a generation of hoarders on the scale of Edmund Trebus.

I feel cheated of the spate of guilt free ‘de-cluttering’ that accompanied the Blair era. ‘How to de-Clutter’ books and Life Coaches seemed to promise that an empty attic was the key to enlightenment. And what a joyful antidote that was to my parents’ post war penny-pinching (the quarter of a tomato in the fridge, the broken teacups full of dripping, the bags of old tights for tying up the beans).

Their legacy is that I still feel sick with shame when I throw food away.  But, perhaps I should.

Nevertheless, I await with interest the day that my son regards his ice cream carton lunchbox with horror and demands its replacement with something China-made and embellished with super-heroes.

It depresses me to consign all those polypropylene (PP) containers to the bin.  Alongside PET, it is one of the most commonly used household plastics, used as DVD cases, soup pots and, of course, margarine tubs.  They are potentially, recyclable, of course, but according to the BBC there won’t be household collections for another five years. Not even I can contemplate collecting a garrison of PP containers until recycling facilities are available. But then again, if I move aside those old oil cans…