It poured with rain today, but that didn't matter in as far as my plan was to spend the day cleaning the house. I gave up with formal New Year's resolutions a long time ago, but I generally survey my life around this time of the year, and one of the conclusions I came to was that maybe it would be nice to live in a slightly cleaner and tidier house. Not that I particularly like cleaning and tidying, but I like the results. I also decided that it would be nice to have flowers more often, instead of just occasionally buying jugs, and bought a modest bunch of five alstroemeria stems while I was in Tesco on the first round of the Christmas shop. The alstroemeria would look better with a few stems of greenery, but it was raining too much to go out and pick any.
Buying flowers was the simple bit. Cleaning took rather longer. In fact, hostilities will resume in the morning, since I'm only two thirds of the way round the kitchen and half way across the sitting room. I have vacuumed unbelievable quantities of cat fur out of the rugs, off the walls, and from the gaps under the doors. Vacuuming the pouffes I was reminded of the washer woman in Three Men and a Boat who said that she ought to have charged extra to wash their clothes, as they were so dirty it was not laundry, more in the nature of an excavation. Every five minutes the red light showed on the vacuum cleaner, indicating that it was blocked up, and I had to remove the filter and pull out wads of fur. The filter lives in a removable plastic box with a hinged bottom that opens, and as well as tipping fur out of the box you have to unscrew a cone shaped section and peel the fur off that. Getting the whole thing back into the machine is made more difficult by the fact that the plastic hinge on the bottom has broken, so that the end drops off when you try to put the plastic box back in.
There is damp coming through the end wall of the downstairs sitting room. The Systems Administrator has insisted for a long time that there is nowhere for damp to come in, which doesn't explain why in that case the plaster has bubbled up. Now the plaster has lifted some more with all the rain, and feels damp when you touch it. We definitely have a leak. It doesn't normally show badly, because there is a chair in front of it, but I moved that to vacuum in the corner.
I have successfully defrosted the fridge, which meant I could remove the piece of a red string bag that oranges came in, that had frozen to the back of the fridge. It seemed a good idea to do this before we filled it with Christmas food.
Meanwhile, the cats were so disturbed by all the cleaning, or the incessant rain, that one of them scent sprayed copiously over the curtain that hangs in front of the front door. None of them have ever, ever done that before. I don't know which it was, but suspect Our Ginger, since he was running about looking hyper at the time, whereas the others were lying down in postures suggesting they hadn't moved for a while. I had to dunk the curtain in a bucket of soapy water to clean it, then more buckets to rinse it, and now it has a fan heater playing on it to dry it, otherwise it will stay wet for days, and probably go mouldy. I fear the wretched thing may be shrinking. Probably I was not supposed to wash it as it is made out of furnishing fabric, but it is a double door and the curtain is absolutely vast, and I was not going to set off with a gigantic cat pee stained curtain in search of a dry cleaner. I don't think the chap in the Tesco branch of Timpson with whom I left a velvet scarf earlier today would be willing to accept it.
The Systems Administrator has escaped the cleaning blitz by going to London for the day to lunch with old workmates. Prospective numbers were depleted at the last count by one case of Norovirus, one bad cold, and one wife with a badly cricked neck who needs looking after, but I expect they've had a nice time.
Of course, if the world ends tomorrow it will have been rather a waste to spend my last full day on earth cleaning. Still, as Major Wimsey told his men, according to the Oxford porter who'd served under him, if you've got to meet your Maker, for gawd's sake do it with a clean chin.
Addendum Flicking down the Daily Telegraph's homepage I was startled to see a photograph of a building I thought I recognised as my old convent school. I left when I was ten, and don't recall ever going back since, and I couldn't have told you what it looked like, but as soon as I saw the picture of what was described as an unusual home for sale, I thought that it had to be Palace Gate in Exeter. Sticking that into Google got me straight to the right page of Devon Life. The chapel where I attended Catholic services, though baptised into the Church of England and rapidly lapsing into agnosticism at best, is now an extremely stylish sitting room. I liked the convent school, and even went through a brief phase of piety. We wore white cotton gloves in summer, had elocution lessons, and even now if I hear Where the Bee Sucks or Full Fathom Five, it takes me back to Sister Saint Patrick's class. It turns out the school closed in 1996.
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