My grubby secret
Mary Kenny says that now she is getting older she finds she is taking fewer baths — and is none the worse for it We all notice those little signs of the passing years: the difficulty with remembering names, the growing interest in reading obituaries (and carefully scrutinising at what age the deceased passed away), the increase in visits to the dentist with the concomitant scolding from the hygienist. But here’s another observation I have made about the Senior Citizen years: one needs to wash less.
Young people, with their healthy glands and overactive hormones, may need all those daily showers and baths; but for people over 60, when the blood waits upon the judgment, cleanliness is a less urgent ordinance. We sweat less and we smell less, so showering or bathing once every two or three — or four — days is surely quite frequent enough for oldies. This could be our contribution to the environment, which can be damaged by too much dependence on water supplies, or by the excessive use of chemical washing agents or detergents.
The suggestion would, I daresay, shock those contemporary telly-evangelists, Kim Woodburn and Aggie MacKenzie, who have swept through the nation like a dose of salts with their series How Clean is Your House? and then Too Posh to Wash. In their best-selling Christmas book, also called Too Posh to Wash, the pair of hygiene termagants excoriate the ‘shockers and stinkers’ they’ve met on their travels. ‘We’ve been shocked to find how many dirty, unhygienic honkers from all walks of life are living amongst us.’ Kim and Aggie want every individual in the country squeaky-clean, body-hairless — they don’t like men with beards or stubble, and Aggie once even waxed her own armpits — and deodorised down to the last particle. Towels should be changed every day, people should take daily fiveminute hot showers, change their bed linen twice a week, and check their anatomies for tummy-button fluff. If you followed their routine, you would have little time left for other, far more important pursuits, such as staring into space and thinking about the meaning of life. ‘Cleanliness is ... next to godliness,’ is a puritan philosophy designed to keep people scrubbing away at the stains in their lives, rather than leaving them free to eat, drink and be merry: it is a self-flagellating cast of mind which equates the absence of dirt with the absence of sin or, as the pair would put it, ‘skankiness’. But it is also a philistine philosophy: if washing takes up so much of your time and attention, the pursuit of culture is occluded. Understandably, most intellectuals have been not too posh but too high-minded for daily ablutions.
To be sure, Kim and Aggie make certain reasonable points. One concerns hair. Although I am not, nowadays, an over-fastidious bather, I do think hair should be washed fairly regularly: dirty hair does indeed smell — far more, perhaps, than bodies do. The smell of dirty hair also carries: I had someone in the car not long ago whose hair quite clearly hadn’t been washed for two or three weeks, and it was indeed manifest. Aggie and Kim are also right about pongy feet, most especially since so many folk now wear trainers, which can be a breeding ground for athlete’s foot. And their bossy precept that everyone should wash their hands after visiting the loo (especially, they add, nannyingly, after ‘doing a number two’) is perfectly correct.
But look, there is reasonable cleanliness, unreasonable over-cleanliness and neurotic cleanliness. Towels do not need to be changed every day: you are already clean when you use a towel. At home, it is an insupportable burden on the housewife to have to do so much laundry. Even in posh hotels nowadays, guests are encouraged to retain their towels for two days, a custom started by the very clean Scandinavians for ecological reasons. Kim and Aggie are also too dismissive of the suggestion, made in some research papers, that asthma and certain allergies have increased so rapidly because we are too clean: more bacteria flourish amid dirt and filth than in cleanliness, they say. Yes, but there is a happy medium: the old Cockney saying ‘every child needs a peck of dirt’ was based on grandmothers’ wisdom.
They are also, in my view, far too keen on deodorants and anti-perspirants. Deodorants, which mask smells, are probably okay, and I even have recourse to such myself. But anti-perspirants seem to me to be questionable. Should you apply a chemical agent to your body which halts a bodily function? There have been some suggestions — speculative, so far, but worth considering — that anti-perspirants could cause breast cancer. Most breast cancers occur primarily in the left breast; most right-handed women apply anti-perspirants more vigorously under the left armpit, where the glands are. More research is being done on this; but in the meantime, steer clear of anti-perspirants, say I.
Too much washing and cleaning around the house means an increase in kitchensink slavery for women. Moreover, many over-fussy approaches to cleaning are inimical to the bon vivant. Teapots and wine glasses should never be put in the dishwasher, or subjected to corrosive detergents. I have it from Mr Sam Twining himself that a teapot should never be mixed with washing chemicals, as this ruins the true taste of tea. I have it from a senior wine expert that a champagne glass is better when it is a tiny bit grubby: a detergent-clean glass ruins the sparkle in champagne.
Kim and Aggie are in the business of showbiz entertainment and overall they are possibly more a force for social good than not. At least they are not a government department trying to boss us about using the coercive arm of the law, so beloved of the Blairite mafia. Some of what the pair say is instructive: chaps should not wear their underpants for two weeks running, and urinating in the shower is not a pleasing practice. I just enter a caveat for moderation in the matter of cleanliness, and a codicil suggesting that once past 60, we don’t need to be quite so fanatical about it. If we become what Aggie would call ‘manky’ old women, and not nice to be near, our loved ones will surely mention the fact.
And there is a gratifying matter of ‘less is more’, too. If you shower only every three days, a shower becomes something like a pleasure. As with eating when you are hungry, washing when you are dirty is strangely satisfying. A chore turns into a delight, and it is not often that this occurs in the process of ageing.
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