Doing a Proper Job

Apologies to my regular readership for the lack of communication in recent days... blame it on sleep deprivation turning me into something closely resembling an opera-singing zombie. I have but a hazy recollection of the past week or so, and I suspect I may JUST have been somewhat irrational from time to time, but this will doubtless merely have added fuel to the villagers' perception of me as Being A Bit Strange - so nothing much lost there then. Despite some hairy moments (including once having to put Little Shane in one of the cooler Aga ovens to keep him alive) The Kittens are all fine, so I am putting a mental two fingers up at the Fat Vet's worst predictions. They are now quite tubby little blobs and are eating by themselves - a ghastly mess of kitten food squelched up with kitten milk into a disgusting stinky slop, but the stench is a small price to pay for getting a decent night's sleep IMHO. Job well done.

However, kitten related chatter is not the point of my blogging today. I am ANGRY... read on.

As regular readers of my ramblings will know (blogs passim) I absolutely, utterly, and completely detest housework. In my opinion I am not going to be on my deathbed wishing I'd done more cleaning, so for me that is excuse enough to spend as little time on it as possible and instead do things which give me, or others, joy. However, this regularly brings me into conflict with Troll, who, as I do not have a job as such, regards it as incumbent on me to spend my time ensuring the place is scrubbed to within an inch of its life. It doesn't matter how many times 'in your dreams, pal' hits his eardrums. It doesn't matter how miserable it makes me to spend what is, for me, valuable time awake cleaning things which are going to require the same doing tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that... it doesn't matter that deep down he knows he is as unremittingly untidy as me. No, it is My Job and I am a Slattern, Pikey, Dirty and a Bad Housewife if everything isn't gleaming. [At this point I think it is not a low blow to point out that at the Algerian Autistic Man Camp the only things Troll actually has to do for himself are get out of bed, wash himself and put his clothes on - they have magic things called cleaners, chefs and laundresses to deal with everything else. But of course, the fact these things are conspicuously lacking from my life is down to it being My Fault for being a Feckless Musician rather than an Upright and Responsible Scientist, isn't it??].

However, every so often, when the chaos gets more than even I can deal with, I do accept, albeit reluctantly, the necessity of doing the 'clean and tidy' routine. And, being brought up in the Stalinist regime established by my grandmother, I DO THINGS PROPERLY. In the case of cleaning, this means getting everything off the shelves, worktops etc and scrubbing the said shelves or worktops thoroughly. It means all the woodwork is washed down, including the tops of doors. It means wiping evidence of Mini's grubby fingers from paintwork and dusting on the top of cupboards and dressers. In short, once I've boxed up my distaste for the task sufficiently to actually get on with it, the said task is done to the degree where the Chief Medical Officer could happily perform open heart surgery in the space without the thought of MRSA even crossing his mind. Because, according to the Grandmother Code 'it is not worth doing a job at all if you don't do it properly'.

Now, given Troll's frequent ranting on the subject of cleanliness, you'd think he'd understand the concept of Doing Things Properly, wouldn't you? Not a bit of it - because, to put it simply, it follows that if he understood the philosophy he would have to do it too. And here is where we find the mismatch between what comes out of Troll's mouth regarding this issue and what the man actually DOES himself. Granted, if you walked into a room which had been 'Trolled', initially you'd think 'Oh this is nice'. However, spend more than 5 minutes in the same room and you start to notice things; viz. those items which have not been put away at all but merely piled, admittedly in a Very Neat Pile, in a corner; or, despite their often unaesthetic appearance, on a windowsill for everybody to see when the look in; or, as a last resort, against the wall. You notice the skirting board crevices are still harbouring the dust which you know was there a few days ago. You look up and see the spiders haven't been rendered homeless. Move something on a worktop, and you find the space underneath the item isn't quite as pristine as the open bit you could see before you moved it, nor is the bit of shelf underneath the book you've just taken out very nice either, however gleaming the rest of the shelf might be. There's a little grey ring at the extreme edge of the floor all around the room because the mop won't QUITE make it all the way to the skirting board. Get the picture? Good - because it DRIVES ME NUTS.

Frankly, were it not for the time spent lecturing me on my manifold sins and deficiencies, I'd be extremely grateful for him doing anything in the way of helping with the housework burden: unfortunately, having been forced to listen to the said litany of manifold sins etc., I am not in the mood to cut Troll any slack and to me, this half-doing of tasks is worse than not doing them at all because aside from being sloppy, and in a strange way dishonest, it just screams hypocrisy. Despite the many discussions on this issue over the years, Troll is no further towards understanding my point of view and I don't expect that to change any time soon; he firmly believes doing the minimum to give an illusion of cleanliness is quite sufficient thank you very much. Grrrrrr. And Aaaaargh.

A quite separate, but equally infuriating, issue is that of what has gradually come to be termed 'Tiddly Tiddly Poke Poke'. This, gentle readers, is not a quaint Victorian parlour game enjoyed at Chateau Angevin, but rather my term for the Troll demeanour whenever something manual is called for. In case people haven't twigged, Troll is Very Tall; were he to stop slouching he would be around 6'5"- 6'6" (we aren't quite sure because the ruler at the doctor's isn't tall enough to measure him properly - the nurse has to stand on a chair and use a ruler on top of it when he has medicals). I am around 5'8" - quite tall for a woman, but obviously dwarfed when standing next to Troll. If you were asked which of the two of us would use the smaller, fiddly, pokey motions if handed a manual task, given our respective sizes, you'd think it would be ME, wouldn't you? Think again - most of the things I do are are done in 'broad brush' motion - it is TROLL whose movements are small and delicate. Tiddly Tiddly Poke Poke.

Now, perhaps I should be more tolerant on this issue, but there is something in me which can't help but be irritated by the sight of such a large man fiddling around like a ditsy little girlie. I honestly couldn't tell you precisely WHAT annoys me so much - perhaps it is just the extreme mismatch, perhaps it is just the low-level scratching sounds it makes - but annoy me it does. I absolutely refuse to be in the same room when Troll Attempts Toast, as the sight of the butter being delicately jabbed onto the toast is enough to give me apoplexy - 'Tiddly Tiddly Poke Poke'. Similarly, the spectacle of Troll gently dabbing at worktops when he 'cleans' them is like nails down a blackboard to me; 'PUT SOME FLIPPING ELBOW GREASE INTO IT, MAN' is my usual bellow. Bewildered stares ensue - you have to feel sorry for the guy on some levels. Unsurprisingly, given this, our respective choice of appliances are poles apart - for example, on the rare occasions Troll tries ironing, he prefers a light, shaped, iron and diddles it around on the clothes - 'Tiddly Tiddly Poke Poke'. I take the view that the alternative name for ironing is 'pressing', get the heaviest iron I can lay my hands on and press the living daylights out of the garment. You get the picture...

Anyway, all the above came to a head this morning when, following my second decent night's sleep (as The Kittens can now be left overnight with a bowl of slop and will not starve) I decided I no longer had an excuse for just leaving everything to go to hell in a handcart and decided to attack the utility room for starters and the kitchen as the main course. Now, as I am sure you can all understand, ten days or so of Mini tramping in and out of the kitchen door from the farmyard, doing various craft activities and generally being the grubby little urchin he is, had left its mark on the floors and walls. The Kittens are not pristine little individuals either, nor are the rest of our cats. In my general tiredness I have tended to just shove things where there is space for them rather than put them where they should be. I have also, perforce, had to cook various meals to keep Mini and I alive. It all adds up to a Bit of a Mess Really. So, after a bit of thrashing around putting things away where they should be, scrubbing worktops and handbasins and bowls and shelves and anything else which didn't run away and wiping down walls and tiles it was the turn of the floor. And here we come to the stumbling point.

Some time ago, my Dyson vacuum cleaner finally gave up the ghost and died on me so my method of dealing with floor detritus has been to sweep up with a broom and dustpan-and-brush, and then get down on my hands and knees and give the whole lot a good old scrub with some soap and hot water. However, the notion of Being On The Floor And Using A Scrubbing Brush wasn't one which appealed to Troll so he, at some point, scampered off to the shops and came back with a particularly unappealing specimen of vacuum cleaner called 'The Henry'. Having tried to use it once, found it was uniquely adapted to Troll's 'Tiddly Tiddly Poke Poke' method of working - and therefore deeply unsuitable for me - I shrugged, and abandoned the thing, continuing to use my trusty old broom. Troll, however, loves the hideous item; so I've just let him get on with it and done my best to turn a blind eye to the aforementioned 'grey ring around the room' on the basis it keeps him happy. And a Happy Troll is a Quiet Troll - which can only be a good thing.

Today, however, was different - Mini for some arcane reasons known only to himself had pinched my broom and I tracked it down to the orchard. (I suspect it had been used to torment our gander, Marcel, who hates Mini with a passion). It thus needed to be soaked in a bucket of soap-and-hot-water itself and could not be used for the job in hand - I was forced to contemplate The Henry. And contemplate it I did... despite having changed the bag (back to the Dark Ages after the lovely Dyson bagless system) - a job I HATE - and spent double the amount of time hoovering the utility room I used to take with the Dyson, when it came to the hands-and-knees-and-scrub routine I still discovered bits it had left - I did a better job with my broom and dustpan-and-brush, frankly. In addition, the pole-things you hold when you shove the brush bit around aren't adjustable. So, with the extra pole in place the length was perfect for a 6'5" Troll but far from perfect for a 5'8" ME. Take the spare pole out and I resembled one of Snow White's dwarves picking away at the coal face. Furthermore, it makes a truly horrid highpitched WHINE which offends my conservatoire-trained ears like little else. Hissy fits all round.

Unsurprisingly, at the end of this fiasco I was absolutely screaming with rage. If I am actually in the mood to DO a job I hate, I don't think it is unreasonable to expect the tools on hand to Do The Job Properly. And The Henry does not fall into that category. I have, therefore, emailed Troll with my ultimatum: he has until the close of play today to agree IN WRITING (ie. with no possibility of weaseling out of it by dint of saying 'I didn't say that') to take me to Comet the day after he returns next week, where we will purchase a lovely new Dyson for me. If he does NOT agree to this, I am flinging The Henry into the skip and ringing up the skip company to come and take it away, thus rendering Henry-salvage impossible. And then it will be back to the broom and dustpan-and-brush regime for poor old Troll. 'Tiddly Tiddly Poke Poke' that, my friend. As an added extra I have also made him aware I want him to undertake IN WRITING he is not EVER going to go out and buy appliances I have to use too without my being there also.

So guys... watch this space. The clock is ticking and I can hear the siren call of the skip wending its way towards The Henry. Will Troll save it? Will I have the satisfaction of hearing it crunch into the junk already in there when the Troll email doesn't arrive in time? Will I have to clamber in to rescue it if the email arrives late? Only time will tell....