a domestic day

The fog never lifted all day, and I was reminded why every year I think it would be lovely to go to the carol service in Long Melford's splendid wool church, and then don't buy tickets.  Really my friend and I were very lucky over our trip to Cambridge.  We certainly wouldn't have wanted to drive to Cambridge today.

Fortunately today neither of us had to go anywhere, and the fog didn't make any difference to my plans since the day was already earmarked for housework.  Things had got rather grubby and dishevelled while we both had colds, but I was not starting from a zero base of grubbiness because the Systems Administrator made a start on Wednesday while I was out.  I never gave public credit where credit was due at the time because I was so taken up with my outing, but I got home to find that the SA had vacuumed the house, including the bedroom where for days I'd been carefully walking around the little pile of earth that fell out of my gardening trousers so as not to tread it into the carpet.  I hate vacuuming.  And the SA had put out the paper for recycling and the rubbish, including the plastic off the cat food multipacks and magazine wrappers from the waste paper basket in the study and not just the kitchen bin.  And worked out correctly that it was best to empty the vegetable peelings bin into the plastic sack of old poultry litter waiting to be mixed into the next compost bin as I filled it, and not just sprinkled on top of any of the full bins.  I was so happy when I stepped through the front door and saw that the detritus of gravel and dust off our shoes and the cats had gone and that the cats' food dishes were resting on clean newspaper.

The kittens have done their best to undermine the good work since then by shredding a toilet roll on the landing, and some leaves and Strulch have come in stuck to Mr Fluffy,  But the house is still a lot cleaner than it was before the SA's efforts.  I wiped the kitchen units and the Aga, and shook the accumulated crumbs out of the toaster.  It has a removable floor for cleaning so you don't actually have to upend it over the sink, I have discovered.  Who knew?  We have had the toaster for about a decade.  It belonged to the Systems Administrator's late mother.

As a break from cleaning the kitchen I caught up with the ironing, and felt a glow of accomplishment as I cleared the last rumpled garment off the spare bed.  The secret with ironing is not to let the pile grow so huge it becomes terrifying.  One of the listeners' one sentence weeks on Radio 4's iPM programme this evening was from somebody who had got to the bottom of their ironing basket for the first time in seven years.  Our spare bed has been more manageable since the SA finally admitted that post City there was really no need to keep the SA's entire stock of about two dozen Thomas Pink white double cuffed office shirts on the bed pending ironing, and consigned most of them to the textile recycling skip.