Home life
A dusty answer
Alice Thomas Ellis
The man who mends the tumble-drier wended his way through the clematis the other day and when he reached the laundry door, fending off the castor oil plant, he said, as I greeted him, 'Dr Livingstone, I presume.' I explained that the tumble-drier had been incapacitated by a brassiere hook which had caught in its metal perforations and tied the other clothes into a knot. For some reason this had caused all the machines in the basement to give people electric shocks when they touched them a sort of contagious hysteria — and every- day existence had assumed a dangerous aspect. He said that was nothing. Last time he'd had to treat a tumble-drier with this complaint it had brought about a divorce. A steel-reinforced brassiere had become detached from its cantilever which had gone through the barrel part to foul the engine. The housewife said, as he retrieved and triumphantly displayed it, that she herself personally never wore that sort of bra and she'd have to have a word with her husband when he got home.
That, however, is not the point. The point is that I was recently surprised to find the home described in an article as a `dream house': 'Everything is just too perfect'. This is, of course, hugely gratify- ing, but I do wonder whose house the author of the piece was visiting under the impression that it was ours. He says there seems little to disturb the flow of life. What can he mean? He says there is 'just enough mess to reassure those visitors who mis- takenly believe they have wandered into a Sunday colour supplement feature'. Par- don? What standards can he be judging us by? What was he drinking? Whatever it was I could do with some if that's the effect it has.
Another lady asked last week how I would choose to describe the house. 'Ele- gant?' she suggested (she has not actually been here). I thought for a while and said `dusty' might more exactly convey the ambience. While Janet was on her hols the cat was sick on a pile of clean washing that she had left. Nobody was prepared to deal with this emergency so I tried to persuade the eldest son that it was his cat, Cadders, who had perpetrated the outrage. Unfortu- nately we all know that it is my cat, Puss, who can't hold her Kit-E-Kat, so I had to fall back on pathos and remind him that it was my birthday and I couldn't be expected to cope with anything too demanding. He was very noble about it and did what was necessary but I don't think people in the supplement features are often discommod- ed in this fashion. I don't think they lose their marriage lines or everybody's birth certificates, or the important papers their mother gave them to look after. And I don't believe their kettles electrocute them when they propose to make a cup of tea. And I do believe they can actually walk into most of their rooms. Some of ours are piled so high with old papers and school- books and broken pictures that you can't even put a coffee mug down on the floor. I do mean, sincerely, to tidy it all up one day, just as I mean to learn to dot i's properly. At present whenever I dot an i I get it on the up-stroke of the next letter so you can't see it and I have to do it twice (`twice' is all right because the next letter is lower than the — oh God, I wish life wasn't so complicated).
The man who mends the tumble-drier just rang to say the reason he hadn't been back was because of the postal strike. The spare part has been held up somewhere. He said it wasn't that they ever used the post. They use Securicor who are now so busy that they have a backlog and do not know when they will be able to deliver the spare part, and I only hope the cat is feeling better because washing has to be dried and I don't trust the tumble-drier in its present incomplete stage. There are enough shocks in life reading about your own home life from a strange point of view.
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