The anti-moth campaign has begun in earnest. The Systems Administrator emptied one wardrobe of its alluvial layer of shoes, and the impenetrable mass of shirts. Sundry other items came to light, including two ready made bow ties, one white, one black, a Northampton rugby club scarf, an odd lambswool sweater miraculously free of holes, a battered cheap ersatz Panama hat, and a mysterious assortment of ties.
Men can't be too careful with ties. A friend of the SA's once bought a stripey one from a High Street shop because he liked the pattern, and then found himself being quizzed in a lift at the bank where he worked about his military career, having managed to buy a rip-off of an actual Guards tie. My favourite tie anecdote is from sailor and author Tom Cunliffe, who, in case he should wish the visit the sort of yacht club that requires men to wear ties, kept one of an Admiral of the Imperial Japanese Navy tucked away in a locker. I myself used to possess a college scarf, but our colours are a very dreary brown and white, and I was not too upset when it succumbed to a previous disaster involving a wardrobe and a cat.
The SA's purge of the first wardrobe yielded four black bin bags of discarded shoes, and six of clothes to go to the tip. Once it was empty I vacuumed every crevice, as instructed by the pest controller, and sprayed the interior with particular attention to the crevices. Despite the six black bags of old clothes, there still seemed to be a lot of shirts left, which I replaced, sorting them out with hairy winter weight check numbers and denim at one end of the rail, and light cotton at the other. The SA, displaying an unprecedented level of interest in the organisation of the wardrobe, announced the intention of moving the trousers on to hangers with clips, instead of folding them over the cross bars of normal ones.
I did the same thing for both of my wardrobes. So far I have not found any more moth damage, which is a relief, though it beats me how on that basis they managed to alight on the most historic and potentially valuable garment in my motley collection. Admittedly I have not yet looked inside its cover at the state of my shearling coat, but none of the knitwear and no other jackets have been attacked. Just the Katherine Hamnett. Ha ha.
The smell of insecticide began to get a bit much, and I left the chemical to do its work and the pong to wear off, and took the bags of old clothes to the dump, together with the dead vacuum cleaner, the leaking kettle, the phone system that stopped working, and a stereo that still functioned, but had been so far superseded by new technology that I couldn't see anybody wanting it, or its miserable speakers. When I got back I discovered I'd missed hearing the first cuckoo.
The great clean up is still not finished, since all of our shoes that are not going to the tip are currently spread out over the bedroom floor, and the laundry basket is erupting with things that need washing. The limiting factor is not washing, but drying, since we don't have a tumble dryer, and today I resorted to an expedient which has served humanity for centuries, of draping still damp pullovers over some convenient shrubs to finish drying in the sun. Though most people through history have probably not used topiary box balls.
grt
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