Peaceful Days, Restful nights

When one takes a year off, one thinks that all hassle and rush will be over.  Life will consist of swanning around with cocktails and long walks in the forest, preferable also with cocktails. Pah, and again I say, pah! After 7 months of recovering from the NHS, gazing at the walls and gibbering ,with occasional long walks on a therapeutic basis, one returns to normal energy levels, looks around at said walls and thinks, hum, they need redecoration, and that curtain isn’t straight and I’d quite like to get out now please.

Of course, what we’ve done in the last few days would have been the work of but a few hours back in the old days, but, in mitigation, we are slightly out of practice.

Last week, I got a nasty, but short lived virus, so after being sofa bound (back to the ole comforting walls) for a few days, we went to my grandmother’s on Friday afternoon and met up with my uncle and his family including a dog and a four year old.  After a few hours of that we went to help out at a local youth group.  I’ve never played on one of those dance mat things before.  Apart from the “I’ve so got to have one of these” factor, they are jolly tiring.  I randomly threw my feet around more or less willy-nilly and quite, quite astoundingly, they landed on some of the circles at the right time!  Amazing what they will come up with nowadays... Perhaps they should market a Tant Dance.  Ooh how will that translate? let’s see...... Mad Aunt Dance!  The Youth (we have youth here, not yut) were pleased to inform me that my pigtails were hyper fashionable and not too young for me – RESULT!

 After several hours of hangin’ (oh it took me back!) we all trooped upstairs for a gig with a chap playing a guitar and his dad talking about Forgotten Children. At 11pm we trooped downstairs again.  I thought that everyone here went to bed at 9.30!!  What happens? Does everyone suddenly get a sensiblesness transplant when they reach 21? There’s probably some sort of government department with regulations and own bureaucracy.

AND THEN the next day we trotted off to view a house, went to the local market for plants and got some tickets for a concert that evening!  What??? What were we doing?? Still he did very well for a white boy from Norway singing jazz soul.  In fact, the bass player was almost as good as Ben Reed, but not quite, obviously! And it was the first time I’d danced since coming here (yesterday could not be described as dancing, I’ll have you know).  Just as well I’ve reached the age where I don’t care what I look like; such a relief.

The Sunday service next day made me wonder how such a musical people can come up with and stay with such crap for their worship songs. So that was something to talk about with God as I sat on the sofa and downed tonnes of painkillers for the muscle induced headache (too much flinging, it would seem).

And as a grand finale, we had the Beth Sewing Mafia with Added Grandmother around here on Monday evening.  So that entailed a complete redecoration of the house and relandscaping whilst cooking a pavlova and slicing fruit, veg, meat, cheese, bread, random cats and anything else that strayed across the worksurface.  (the cat won’t do that again!).

I tell you, when I got my glasses muddled up and downed a pint of wine as I sat and breathed again, I said Never Again...... quothe the raven...........

The Perfect Home...?

We’ve been here 7 months now and I’m quite sure that I’m not yet a captain of industry because of the inordinate amount of time that housework seems to take up.  There’s the sweeping, rug shaking, dusting, composting, washing sinking as well as hovering and scrubbing.  I’m sure I never did this much in London, well, I didn’t cos I had a cleaner. But it took me about 25 years to realise that the skies would not fall in, volcanoes wouldn’t explode in the street and the entire Western civilisation would not collapse in a smouldering ruin if I didn’t wash the bathroom at least 3 times a week.  This is because ‘doing housework’ is genetically programmed into Swedes and the houses are generally immaculate and incredibly neat, if a little, errh, frou-frou (depending on the class).  Back in the 50s, my mother was learning how to clean a house properly, in sixth form college, in between her astrophysics and eugenic gene manipulation classes.  (Incidentally, if you do a lot of housework properly, quantum does begin to make sense).

The average Swedish woman (ASW) would love Martha Stewart’s website, if they could get over the complete insulting patronising implications of the word “homemaker”. Most houses I’ve been in in London would be used as a practice house for the ASW as a ‘before’ example.  They are what my grandmother’s was like when she couldn’t see and had her heart complaint.  My house is cleaner than most in London, but I feel hopelessly inadequate here.

I can’t help but feel that this obsession with ‘house-work’ is self-inflicted by women. When they weren’t allowed to work, the state of the home was the only way they had to display their marvellousness, together with handiwork and cooking.  My grandmother tells of a woman who was forgiven for only shaking her rugs once a week because her lace was so wonderful.  Forgiven? Forgiven by whom?  It was the women of course, who bought into the myth given them by men that it was the only thing they could do and so had to do it incredibly well to justify their existence.  Implied in this myth is that the family or the Man needs to have the house ‘looking good’.  Pah!  The average man wouldn’t know if something hadn’t been dusted for a day or a year.  And what of today, where we do have other things to do, like full time employment?  It comes down, of course, to doing what is comfortable for yourself, which also means not noticing what others do in their homes (oooh not so much fun there!). 

Here, I keep the dust bunnies from getting above adolescence and shake the rugs a couple of times a week, but I haven’t yet got back into the once a week major clean, which includes the attic or the twice a year wall washing etc or the daily dust.  So I have been corrupted by the UK, where the standards of housework are, quite frankly, slovenly, but there is so much more interesting stuff to do than dusting!

Just don’t get me started on the word “House wife”....