Household helping

 

My eldest grandson apparently works on a nine-day week. And on each day he wears a new pair of pyjamas. When I fold up his washing each week the collection of PJs is beyond normal. Not that they are, in fact, “pairs” of pyjamas. It’s usually an assortment of bottoms matched (or rather unmatched) with some t-shirt-type top. And why is it that as an almost-teenager he believes the floor is the correct place to store any garment which has touched his hands? Each day he apparently pulls out a selection of t-shirts and shorts, decides which he wants to wear, and drops the rest on the floor. Some, indeed, migrate under his bed.

I don’t think I expect him to be tidy. I don’t remember my own sons’ being particularly neat. But given I’m (mostly) the Bilgola Plateau washer-woman, I’d just appreciate one washing load per child, not two as is the case with the almost-teenager.

I rather pride myself on my washing skills. In the seven-odd years I was a home-mother I mastered stain-removal. I still have a collection of wonderful home-hint books which tell me the hundred things you can do with vinegar and another hundred things you can do with baking soda. There are also cleaning jobs which utilise Borax (I can’t remember what Borax is) and others which require ammonia which I duly purchased for the new house and have not yet used.

I know that the residue of the almost-teenager’s regular nosebleeds comes out of pillow slips and bedding by soaking in cold water. (Why are pillow covers called pillow slips? Another verbal conundrum.) I know that his disgustingly filthy school tops need a good soak with a powerful stain remover; you can’t just throw them in the wash and hope for the best. I know to check all pockets for tissues otherwise the navy shorts come out with white shreds all over them.

I have other housekeeping skills as well. For example, tea or coffee-stained cups can be soaked for a short time with bleach and water and they come out pristine. Bleach water is also great for cleaning vases with slimy dead flower water in them. Glass vases come out absolutely sparkling

I think I told you before of the marvellous trick for cleaning silver cutlery and other silver pieces. Line a big bowl with Alfoil, put in your silver, throw a handful of bi-carb soda on top and pour in boiling water – magic clean!

When you clean out your fridge, wipe it over with vanilla dropped into water. It leaves a lovely smell.

In decades gone by, when I was young, my mother and I used to get up after the meal (cooked by my mother) and head to the kitchen. My father and brother retired to my father’s study (grrrrrr!!). After my mother washed up and I dried, we would soak the tea-towels (another verbal query – why not pot-towels, or saucepan-towels, or coffee-towels?) in soapy water and each morning they were rinsed out and hung up to dry. In our house today, we no longer dry anything; what doesn’t go in the dishwasher dries in the dish rack.  (I know God is a woman! A man god would never have bothered to invent a dishwasher.) Our tea towels are used to wipe our hands, a huge no-no in the Olden Days.

Now although I thought I’d reached the end of my “phrases”, it appears I have not. So here are another few which popped into the space which is my mind over the past week.

Take “dressed to the nines”. Why not “… the tens” or “…the seventeens”?

We say something is as “dead as a dodo”. Now obviously this refers to the Dodo, a large and tame flightless bird hunted to extinction when Europeans came to its home island of Mauritius. But I would suspect that more than half of the people who use the phrase have never heard of the Dodo and the sad story of its demise. And why isn’t it “dead as a dinosaur”, equally euphonious and equally extinct. In fact I think I’m going to start using the latter just for fun. Maybe it will catch on?

There are many phrases which unkindly refer to a person with a less than average IQ. There’s “a sandwich short of a picnic” or “not the full quid” for example. There’s also the phrase I heard recently to refer to a gay man: “Camp as a row of tents”.

Someone you are happy to see is said to be “a sight for sore eyes”. I suppose it suggests that someone or thing is so good to see that it might cure sore eyes; but it’s exceedingly odd.

A related phrase usually applied to beautiful girls is “a diamond of the first order”. I get “diamond” but can only suppose that “the first order” is a way of implying that said diamond is of the highest quality. But then what of “a diamond of the first water”? Mysterious!

We can have “a whale of a time” which presumably means a really great time, but why “a whale”? What about an elephant?

In another animal metaphor, if we’re organised we can say “all our ducks are in a row”. Why ducks? Why a row?

And another contribution from Denise in Lennox Head. Someone referred to her small granddaughter’s good behaviour by saying “butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth”. We all know what it means but how did it get there?

 

Quote of the week from Chamber’s Dictionary of Modern Quotations:’    

From US humourist Will Rogers on the statue of the (one armed) Venus de Milo: “See what happens if you don’t stop biting your fingernails.”