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.”