Saturday 5 September 2015

cleanliness is next to godliness

Today was a bit of a lost day in my life, because I spent it cleaning.  Vacuuming is so much less interesting than weeding the borders, or pruning (or practically anything that involves being outside with plants and not stuck inside with a vacuum cleaner), but it has to be done eventually.  Or in this case, by Monday because that's when the beekeeping committee is coming round, and then more thoroughly by Friday, because that's when the housesitter arrives, and he will see more of the house, and by daylight.  None of the committee should go through the laundry and down to the garage, not unless they've taken a wrong turning trying to find the loo.

In fact, vacuuming has to be one of my least favourite domestic tasks.   I don't mind ironing.  I can listen to music while I do it, and there's something quite satisfying about the growing pile of smooth and tidy clothes.  I enjoy cooking, especially when I'm allowed to stick to my specialities of baked and boiled things, with no attempt to coordinate a dozen different dishes to be ready at the same time.  Full roasts and all the trimmings I leave to the Systems Administrator.  I don't even mind wiping cupboard fronts too much.  Again, I can listen to the radio, and it doesn't take very much wiping to make cream coloured units look substantially better, so the results are almost instant. But vacuuming...

The flex always tangles round everything going.  My legs, the furniture, the body of the vacuum cleaner.  It would tangle itself round the cat if he didn't run for cover.  Just as I've got into some sort of rhythm the motor cuts out, red light flashing, because the dust box is full or the filter is blocked with cat fur.  The flap over the dust box does not open easily, and I'm always afraid I've pulled it too hard and snapped some little plastic tab so that it will never stay shut in future, while we attempt to hold it closed with gaffer tape.  Then the flap doesn't want to close again, and I'm seized with the same anxiety.  The cord decides to reel itself right in before I've finished.  And it's noisy so I can't listen to music.  The SA overcomes this problem by wearing earphones, and when we had the old vacuum cleaner which was really noisy would top them off with orange chainsaw ear protectors.  I don't like wearing earphones, so am left listening to the vacuum cleaner.

And it is an endless job.  No matter how thoroughly I think I've chased into every corner, round every skirting board and moulding, as soon as I stop hoovering I see more fluff, and even more as soon as I put the machine away.  Cat fur, pieces of gravel, dead spiders, odd leaves, fragments of firewood that fell through the bottom of the log basket, human hair.  Dust (which is largely dead skin).  Vacuuming is like the toil of Sisyphus.

Thrusting the nozzle (without the brush attachment) into the narrow gap between a CD rack and the wall, I heard an ominous rattle, and then the note of the motor changed.  It had sucked something up.  I switched it off and peered into the end of the tube, then prodded experimentally with my finger.  It was completely blocked about two inches from the end by something shiny and flat, that fitted so snugly it could have been made for the job.  I wasn't sure if it looked black because it was, or because it was transparent and I could see the inside of the nozzle through it.  I tapped it, and the noise was more plastic than glass, but I couldn't work out what the hell it was, or if it would matter if I broke it in the course of getting it out.  Indeed, I couldn't initially think how I was going to get it out.

You cannot rod a vacuum cleaner tube with an eight foot bamboo cane.  It will not bend around the curve in the nozzle, and if I'd looked at the problem properly I'd have been able to see that without wasting my time trying.  I tried levering the blockage out with a pair of scissors, which succeeded in scraping the top and lifting a triangle of foil to reveal a white, expanded plastic looking surface beneath.  I dug into the white plastic with a sharp vegetable knife, and eventually managed to extract what turned out to be the screw top lid from a bottle.

I hate vacuuming.

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