On the Home Front...

I hate those days when the house is in need of ...how can I put it?..some care and attention.  I'm so very, very bad at housework and it makes me so crabby and irritable because it doesn't matter how much elbow grease I put into the task, it never seems to have the same pristine finish as other, more grown-up friends' efforts.  Mind you, that could be because I don't have a proper grown-up house.

We live, the Boy and I, in a bungalow; the proportions of which, if one were an Estate Agent, could probably best be described as bijou.  When we moved here, there were grand plans afoot to make rooms in the roof and extend out sideways and join the garage to the house to make a utility space.  Those all pretty much went by the board over the years, not through having insufficient funds (for truly, we used to be pretty well off!), but more from a dawning realisation that these planned improvements would be pretty messy and long-winded and just, really, too much like hard work.  One does become slightly lazy, living in one of the retirement counties of the U.K.   We just spent more time outside on the veranda, looking at the garden and necking back cocktails and convincing ourselves that we liked living in a tiny cosy space.  Which we still do, don't get me wrong, but the small 1920's cute bungalow is now 90 years old and seems to have developed a sort of habitational senility. 

One would think, that in a house this size, the cleaning and primping would be easy - stand in the sitting room, flap a duster and the airwaves from that would miraculously clean not only the bathroom, but the kitchen and bedroom too, leaving only a little light cushion plumping and bed-making to be done - after one had had a bit of sit-down first, of course. That is not the case.  In the last few months, everything seems to have become either tired, broken or covered in mysterious sooty webs.  No spiders in evidence anywhere - I checked.  I can only assume that, in the night, malevolent sooty web goblins scoot in and carry out revenge attacks for some heinous crime of which we, as humans, are blissfully unaware.  I can't keep up with it. No sooner has the Dyson of Doom been deployed than BAM! - the following morning, the cupboards are re-joined to the wall with sooty goblin web glue.  I cleaned the inside of the windows three times today, with potions of varying strength and toxicity and the damned things are still filmed over with smeary grey stuff.  My arms are aching from the effort, but the windows remain as filmy as they were before I started.  Surely that can't be right?  Keeping this tiny bungalow clean is a bit like maintaining a very old, very large and very stately home and requires a better person that I to do it.

In the end, tired, sweaty and just a teeny bit tetchy I gave up and went and made some bread which is what I should have done in the first place, not battle against the tide of old house dirt.  Wasn't it Quentin Crisp who maintained that after a while, the dust doesn't get any thicker anyway?  I'm adopting that as my mantra.  My friends who live in newer houses will just have to look past my less than shiny skirtings and my dusty hard floors, whilst stepping elegantly over the piles of books and papers and other 'floor-filed' detritus of day-to-day living.  After all, you can ignore pretty much everything else when presented with a wedge of freshly baked bread, a cup of tea and an invitation to sit in the sun on the veranda for a bit of a chat...