The Art of House Husbandry

Ok, so it's nearly half a year since my last update but I have an excuse.

Showing a total lack of consideration for my care and well being, Angela upped and left me………..to go back to WORK!!!!!!

Personally I have always taken the view (and ex colleagues and managers will attest to it) that work is rather vulgar, so much so that I try to avoid it wherever possible.

You might then think I would be grateful to Angela for saving me the odious task of seeking gainful employment, but you would be wrong. By legging it back to her old employers Ernst & Young during office hours Angela very cleverly left me holding the paintbrush and the duster, in a house crying out for both!

Being the sort of person who thought Do It Yourself was a comment your partner makes when you ask for a spot of lunch and another beer during an England World Cup qualifier, it was a bit of a shock to find I had no choice but to repair and re-decorate the whole house.

If I thought that replacing sinks, shower units, waste pipes and re-pointing the exterior brickwork was a challenge, they were nothing compared to "doing the housework."

Don't get me wrong, I've always been happy to get the polish out (and that's not just a heartfelt reference to our last tenants) but washing and ironing have always seemed on a par with taking a trip to Somalia (pointless, fraught with danger and best left to someone else!)

I used to think that ordering breakfast in a US diner was the most complicated task that the male of our species is ever likely to encounter but I was wrong. I realise now that grappling with the terminology of American eggs (sunnyside up, light, easy, over easy, flipped, whipped, crushed, fluffed etc etc) is a doddle compared to the mind blowing complexity of doing "the washing."

It seems so simple, pile of dirty clothes + washing machine + powder = clean clothes. How naïve was that concept? The challenge starts with the inherently dangerous task of emptying the dirty laundry box. A couple of tricks learnt in Africa help here, always approach downwind and always lift the lid with a stick to ensure that anything nasty takes the stick and not your arm.

Once coaxed to the floor and beaten in to submission (Angela's socks are the WMDs that the US and Britain should have looked for before being sidetracked in to Iraq) another challenge presents itself, the selection process.

I stupidly started from the premise that what looked white was white and what looked dark was dark. But no, way too simple, it turns out. You can have "dark" whites and "white" darks. Then of course there are faded darks that can be put in the whites pile, but not faded whites that can be put in the darks pile. The latter, as all women but few men seem to understand, would be a potential disaster.

As if that is not complicated enough then you are up against "delicates" and "fast dyes".After 6 months of washing I've learnt to handle the delicates very gently, carrying them individually to the washing machine whilst re-assuring them they'll feel much better afterwards, but the fast dyes…..phew, it's time to call Angela. Fast dyes are on a par with the Large Hadron Collider, a worthy cause best left to someone else to comprehend.

For the sake of brevity I will not dwell on the vexed issue of lint in your laundry, I prefer Cadbury's (unless Hershey buy them out!) I will also skip the joys of powder versus liquid, alligators (or was that agitators?) and softeners. In our household when and where to add the softener is not a problem, we save money and don't use any.

This is probably a false economy. Living as we do in a particularly hard water area, it takes about two days of wear before clothing stops feeling like chain mail, and it's not as though I need any extra stiffness in my pants! (Should any US friends be reading this, pants are underwear not trousers but hey, we're in the same ballpark!)

Seven hundred words in to this blog and I've not even switched on the washing machine yet! Talking of which, ours was beamed down from a planet called Zanussi, clearly devoid of intelligent life if the confusion of hieroglyphics on the front panel are anything to go by. An added complication is that some of the cycles (don't ask me why they put a bike in there as well) don't work so it is always exciting if the machine completes a wash (I don't get out much do I?)

At the risk of sounding immodest, ironing is where I can claim to be a grandmaster in the art of house husbandry. Any ironing made of a material other than cotton is put in a pile of clothing marked "complicated, best left to Angela." Anything made of a material I'm not sure about goes on a pile "complicated, best left to Angela." Any item that is not perfectly square, including all shirts, goes on a pile (you've guessed it!) "complicated, best left to Angela." All this ensures that Angela has something to do at the weekend that doesn't cost money, and that my table napkin creases are rightly famous.

Juggling the demands of a high powered urge to sit down all day with the above discussed house husbandry has been exhausting as you would imagine. In that time summer has come and gone, (we enjoyed both days), our house interior is whiter than Antarctica thanks to a special offer on B&Q emulsion and 'numerous' friends have visited to say hello (it's true, next door's cat put in an appearance but then left in disgust when offered supermarket own brand cat food!)

The Global Warring summit in Copenhagen is over and, with impeccable timing, we find ourselves blanketed under 6 inches of snow here in Reading. Angela's contract at Ernst & Young runs to February and I could be in danger of getting some Purchasing consultancy work in early 2010, but beyond that we don't know our plans. I would hazard a guess that by next spring the joys of house husbandry may have faded…. who knows?

It just remains for Angela and I to wish you all a very happy credit card debt event, please no presents, (we haven't got you any!) but money always accepted, US dollars or Euros preferred.

Happy New Year and all the best for 2010

Love Scrooge and Angela