Home life
Semi-
Alice Thomas Ellis
Well, here we are again in our coun- try retreat. Nothing changes much. Cad- ders iS asleep in the airing-cupboard and it's raining. The eldest son, who is the actual owner of Cadders, keeps exhorting him to go out and catch moles. I don't know why moles. Cadders ii not a digger and moles seldom emerge from their underground fastness. I suppose he must once have caught one by inadvertence arid made his master very proud. What he usually does is catch shrews and bring them inside the house where he can play with them in peace out of the rain. He never eats them up because I believe they taste awful. I wonder how we know this. Did some hero once eat one in the interests of science? One of the things I think I know is that somebody engaged in studying the causes of diabetes once took a sip of urine. It was very sugary, and bingo — the link was made. Sweet pee. Oh Lord. One has to admire these intrepid explorers into the realms of the unknown, especially those who take all the risks themselves. How differently one would feel about the manu- facturers of cosmetics if they squirted chemicals into their own eyes instead of those of rabbits.
I am in misanthropic mood, having suffered an overdose of people, and at the moment I never want to see another one again. Janet sits in the parlour embroider- ing, the little girls play horrible music in the barns, the eldest son is ensconced in a remote corner with his new computer and I sit in the furthest room of the long house staring out of the window at the wet nettles and pondering the meaning of the uni- verse. In order to db this more efficiently I have eschewed alcohol for the time being. So far this hasn't helped. I don't think I ana programmed with the correct type of ques- tion.
The son (who is of a smugness intoler- able since he has stopped smoking) says helpfully that if he had only brought a certain attachment for his Computer he could have printed this for me. He has taken my mind off the meaning of the universe, and led me to reflect how much I detest attachments — not so much the amatory kind, although in view of the recent hoo-ha I am fairly bored with them too — but the kind that are intended to be joined to some central master gadget. I have a vacuum cleaner that came with attachments: things for sucking mbths out of the curtains, for delving down the sides of chairs after stray coins, crumbs and crisps, for cleaning the stairs and those little inaccessible corners; extra extension rods which get very easily dented and refuse to jOin together; a little hollow brush for dusting the surfaces; and the principal . attachment for cleaning the car- pet. The last-named is designed to flip over in order to clean the parquet and if you lose control for a moment it flips over while you're cleaning the Carpet. The whole thing also gets easily choked, and at this you have to fling it on its side, insert the nozzle underneath, direct the tube out of the window, put it into reverse and switch on — when it promptly blasts the obstruction into the garden. In theory. In practice you spend many hours poking down it with an unwound metal coat hanger. All the attachments get Mislaid, it loses its breath and its power of suction and you're back to the dustpan and brush. Worse, however -- much worse — is a certain food processor which has so manY attachments that it really needs quarters of its own. It has things for chopping and grating and shredding, things for grinding and things for whipping. It has a thing for taking the juice out of carrots and a thing for kneading dough. It has all sorts of things that I don't know the purpose of. It quite possibly has a thing for taking the stones out of horses' hooves. But most spectacular of all it has a thing for turning butter back into cream — which brings us again to the meaning of the universe. It overturns all our latest theories and eon" ceptions; for turning butter back Int° cream, like unscrambling eggs, is in direct contravention of the second law of thermo- dynamics. I am rapidly coming round to the view that all — all — is illusion and our world is most probably nothing but a bit of grit in the eye of some vast and indifferent Being. I expect I'll feel different when It stops raining.
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