Sunday 23 September 2018

Clean and tidy

I am drinking peppermint and ginger tea out of a very nice cup. It is the first time that the cup has been drunk out of, I hope this is what it wished for. The house is warm, clean, bathed in shadows and soft golden light, very quiet, and smells faintly of lavender and sandalwood. The cat is sitting on the couch back about 30cm to my left. He's purring. He loves it, just loves it, when the furniture and the floor has recently been vacuumed, funny about that since he's the producer of all of the things that make it necessary to vacuum. I can't look at him because that just sets him off into all sorts of stupid behaviour. My hair and skin are damp and clean, I'm wearing blue cotton pyjama pants and a very soft white tshirt with a picture of a disco ball and LCD Soundsystem written under it, and as well as this cup of tea I have a bowl of cut-up oranges. The dishes are all washed, the laundry basket doesn't contain enough dirty clothes to fill up the machine, there are nice things to eat in the kitchen if I get hungry. When I get into bed I will lie down in fresh smooth sheets and I will sleep until the sun comes up. And it has taken an enormous effort today to get things to this point. As usual, one has to wonder if a quiet clean house - all the chores finished and nothing left to do - is worth all the time and trouble.

Why not just ignore the dust and the fluff and the piles of unfolded laundry, the heap of hats and coats, the mounds of pencils and drawings and loops of cats'-cradle string, the clutter of books and papers that covers half my bed?

Well, I don't know. I felt dirty and surrounded by dirt. Perhaps it's an effect of the sunshine. In the morning when Lenny came and woke me I asked him to open the curtains and the sun came streaming in. Such a feeling of luxury to be warmed by the sun without getting out of bed. I let him watch TV for a while then I took him to the pool for his swimming lesson. Parents are supposed to watch the swimming lesson but instead I read my current book, which is about Keynes, and which is also why I have had so little time to write anything recently. After the lesson I got into the pool too. After that we went to a bookshop and then to a cafe, just in time - I broke the coffee pot a few days ago -  and then I drove us to Ikea where I had to get something needed for work, and I also had to play house in the little houses like always - Leonard is seven and a half and he still enjoys playing in the little houses - and we had lunch there and while I ate my almond cake and Lenny ate his fish and chips I felt like I was stranded half-way up Kilimanjaro (or maybe half-way down), but still, we stuck at it and accrued a pot plant and plant pot, four glasses, twelve cups, twelve tea-towels and three hand towels, a single-bed quilt cover and a pillowcase, and a vanilla-scented candle, and two packets of biscuits. I think that was all. It's both more and less than I set out to acquire. The plant is nice. The thing for work, a standing-up laptop stand, turned out to be stored in their other depot so I had to drive there to collect it. I managed to get home without having a complete nervous collapse; when I saw the laptop stand thing came in two boxes I felt like I was still stuck on the mountain that rises like a Memphis above the Serengeti only perhaps my oxygen cylinder had a faulty valve. In the car I sang 'Raspberry Beret' very softly and Leonard fell asleep. He woke up at home when I turned off the engine. 

While Lenny watched the first Harry Potter movie I assembled the laptop thing, mashing the threads of at least two of the screws. I cooked our dinner and we ate it in front of the TV while the movie went on. I washed the day's dishes and without really meaning to I sorted out the contents of two of the big drawers in the kitchen, put things away, cleaned objects. I was continually calculating how many more tasks I could get done in the increments of time between superintending each step in Leonard's evening journey towards bedtime. I should not do these things. I should just sit down with my feet up and not ever worry.

We are both pretty excited that Leonard is coming to work with me tomorrow. I packed one bag with books and things for him to keep himself occupied, and another with his overnight things, he's staying with his grandparents tomorrow night. He was in bed and asleep by 7:45pm. I'm going to bed myself, now.




































1 comment:

JahTeh said...

I hate Ikea. Paying a load of money for something I have to work at so it works and there seems to be a lot of people who think the same. Going through Gumtree (more addictive than facebook) there are so many Ikea bits of furniture I wonder if any of them were ever put together or like those damn Billy bookcases have sagged like 70 year old boobs and the books won't stand straight. I want one Queen Anne chair, just one and I'll keep looking through Gumtree until I find it.