Thursday November 8th -Hibernating in Showers

I’m so exhausted it’s very hard to do anything at all today.  It’s one of those days where even the thought of making myself a nice cup of tea just wears me out and makes me want to have a lie down.  In fact I made one twenty minutes ago, and was too tired to drink it!  I just lay around staring at it in an apathetic manner, weakly waving my hands in the international gesture of complete feeblemindedness and keening the word: “sooo-up! Sooo-up!” under my breath.  It’s a good job the phone rang or I’d probably still be there now, a parched and withered husk. How tragic is that?

I have this theory that we are all descended from tortoise (what is the plural of tortoise? Tortoises; tortoi? Who knows? I’ve only ever seen more than one of them at the zoo, and nobody said a thing), or possibly hedgehogs, and that our natural state is one of hibernation during the winter months. What we should be doing is making ourselves a big fluffy nest in October and not coming out until May.  We could take a supply of biscuits and a chamber pot, and all would be well.  Obviously we’d emerge a trifle smelly, and probably needing a trip to the hairdressers, but that could be easily remedied.  I know that I’d pay good money for someone to paint my name on my back in dribbly white emulsion and stuff me in a darkened box for several months without interruption.  Seems like nirvana to me.  When I get to be World Dictator, we shall have a day for the start of hibernation, probably the day we turn the clocks back in October.  You would have a week beforehand to set your affairs in order and buy nesting material, and then everyone should be snugly in bed by midnight on the Sunday.  Those people who suffer from incurable insomnia would be paid a stipend to police the procedure and make sure that everyone complies.  Brilliant… 

I was thinking some more about that pineapple thing that I mentioned in yesterday’s entry.  It made me wonder anew at The Man From Del Monte?  Perhaps he is the head of a sinister crime syndicate, who flout the laws of the land with impugnity because of their lack of fingerprints!  Maybe that’s why he’s always saying ‘Yes!’  He’s endorsing his evil compatriots in their plans for world domination:

“Senor?”

“Yes!”

“Shall I buy this orange grove?”

“Yes”

“Shall I raze it to the ground, turn the peasants into unwilling mule slaves and build an underground lair to rival that of James Bond’s most evil nemesis?”

“Yes!”

“Shall I find a way to fuel our weapons of mass destruction with citrus based products, thereby cutting out our need for dependence on the Middle East, and symbolising the first movement to global power of the sunshine state of Florida?”

“Yes!”

What a nightmarish vision of hell!  It would be pretty terrible to be afflicted with the need to say ‘Yes’, all the time, even if you weren’t running an international mafia style operation.  My children would have an absolute field day, drinking two litres of Coke for breakfast, dining out on Happy Meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner and running around naked, daubed in finger paints.  It would be like Lord of the Flies, set in the East Midlands, and without a pig’s head sacrifice (although we could probably run to a pumpkin if pushed).  Other than that, it would be just like it!

I was also thinking about showers yesterday, and the cleaning thereof, as I was lying in a comatose heap in the bottom of the shower, pretending to wash my hair, but in reality, hiding from the children.  Hiding in the bottom of the shower doesn’t always preserve my privacy, but it does work better than announcing I’m going to the toilet.  This statement, oddly, seems to mean that even if your child was totally fine beforehand, they suddenly display the overwhelming desire to bond with you, no matter what.

During half-term, which was rendered more hellish than normal by Tallulah coming down with a chest infection and being too ill to go out, I decided on a foolish need for twenty minute’s solitary peace.  I wanted to read one chapter of my book. Now this might seem unreasonable, I know in these modern days that children cannot be left alone to do anything by themselves in case of fatal injury, fatal boredom etc.  In my day (here comes the ‘mum’ bit), we were left alone for vast acreages of time with a distinct lack of concern for whether we were bored or not.  My memories of being inside our house are confined to blizzards and other catastrophic weather conditions (when naturally we were outraged that we weren’t allowed out); times of sickness and death; and bed times.  Any other times we were heaved out the door with the injunction to: ‘Get some fresh air.  It will be good for you!’  Translated this means: ‘Bugger off you whining short person.  I’ve got four hundred tasks to do before bed time and I want a fag, a cup of tea and a listen to the Archers omnibus in peace before the tedium of the day commences.’  As a child, I was outraged, a lot.  As an adult I applaud my mother’s methods and am amazed that she is vehement in her refusal to see me employ them on her grand children: ‘You can’t expect them to go out in that!’

So, back to the one chapter.  I fed and watered them, so as to avoid the: ‘But I’m starving!’ routine.  I put the television on to avoid both the: ‘I’m bored!’ and the: ‘How come Olivia gets to watch fourteen hours of unsupervised television every day and I don’t?’ issues.  And then I put the baby in his cot with a bottle of milk, which I thought was a masterstroke, and could not possibly fail.  I shut myself in the kitchen with my book, only to have them hammering on the door within two minutes because they’d lost the remote control, and couldn’t possibly see it, even though it was in the middle of the room surrounded by a glowing nimbus of light.  I tried again, and the baby cried.  I went and gave him his dummy.  By the time I got downstairs, the television was blaring away to itself and the girls were making dens.  This refusal to watch television only ever happens when you want them to watch television and positively encourage them to watch Tracey Beaker, which is the most spurious toss ever to grace children’s television screens and makes Grange Hill look like Songs of Praise.

I decided that if they weren’t watching I would evict them from the lounge, so I set them to do colouring in the kitchen, and even allowed paints (a huge sacrifice on the part of the cleaning lady).  I shut the lounge door.  I sat in a comfortable chair.  I read three pages and all hell broke loose.  They were fighting to the death in the hallway.  Cock fights have been less vicious.  I separated them and sent them to their bedroom, announcing that I was going to the toilet.  I took my book.  I sat down on the unopened lid, and five pages later, Tallulah came in to ask if I was alright because I was being very quiet and she was worried about me!  I gave up.

So, back to the shower.  I was thinking about how horrible showers are to clean.  The glass always goes smeary with those limescale dribbles all over it, and invariably has finger prints and hairs plastered all over it.  The tiles always go manky.  The grouting goes mouldy and all the fixtures are too far above your head (if you’re a short arse like me), to clean them properly.  The only way to do a good job of the inside is to climb in, and if you do it with clothes on you come out damp and smelly and in need of a shower, which means that your lovely clean shower looks like crap shortly thereafter, or if you do it naked, you’re liable to burn your vital bits off with whatever hellishly acrid substances they put in shower cleaners to combat all the galloping ills that showers engender.  It’s a conundrum.

My aunt cleans hers with a hand held steam cleaner.  She has never told me how she avoids becoming wrinkled and prune-like as she merrily steams away in a confined space which turns her shower into a sauna, or whether she does this clothed or naked.  I feel that this is a good thing, as the less details of an aunt’s nakedness one has, the better life is.  It is debatable, leaving aunts out of the equation altogether, whether it is better to have shrunken clothes running with dye and hair like matted straw, or to have shrunken flesh, glowing pink like a gently boiled lobster, and hair like matted straw.  Upon further reflection, I have decided against this option.

My friend  cleans her shower with vinegar, which she tells me has many remarkable properties and leaves the shower sparkling clean, a thing of beauty and a joy forever.  I believe her, as I use vinegar for a number of purposes aside from those standard culinary ones.  It is excellent for example, in bringing down stings and swellings, and helps gets rid of the itching pains of everything from skin itching to nether region itching (I read it on the internet!).  It is great as a window cleaner when combined with newspaper and is an all round hero in many ways.  I decided to give it a go.  It was, I have to say, an unmitigated disaster, and I ended up with pools of vinegar in an otherwise unremarkable looking shower, and I smelled like a chip shop on a Friday after chucking out time.  I wonder whether I used the wrong type of vinegar.  Perhaps I should have gone for a ten year, aged Balsamic vinegar, although thirty quid to get a clean shower seems a trifle extravagant.  Still, at least I gave it my best shot.

So, perusing these matters, whilst hiding (successfully on this occasion), I came up with a brilliant idea.  I’m going to write to Jo Malone (Clean Freak of Glenfield), who makes many things that smell lovely to grace a lady’s bathroom, and suggests that she comes up with a range of products that not only smell lovely, but clean the shower at the same time, without ripping someone’s skin off.  People will greet me saying: ‘Don’t you smell nice?  You remind me of that lovely summer in Tuscany in ’83, doesn’t she Gerald? Doesn’t she smell nice?’ and I will say: ‘Why yes, of course.  I have been cleaning the shower.’  And they will be amazed and bow down to my wisdom and sagacity (which are in fact the same thing, but never use one word when you can use ten eh?  Payment by the yard remember?).

I’ve got half an hour before my peace is shattered and I have to retrieve Oscar from nursery, so I must make some more inroads on the mastery of haiku, or there will be trouble.