Cleaner

Last night I did Items 13 and 14 on my "Things To Do That Need To Be Done" list: clean the drain in the laundry and then just clean the laundry in general.


I am not a fan of the laundry. Nothing good ever happens in laundries. Mine adds absolutely nothing to my life other than to host my washing machine, and it's not like I have a very meaningful relationship with my washing machine to begin with. I go in there, add clothes to or remove clothes from the machine, and leave. Everything in the room is simply a tool for, or worse a reminder of, chores that need to be done. There's the mop for cleaning the kitchen floor, the iron for doing the ironing, the ladder for changing light globes, the rags for doing the dusting... it's like a small, tiled Museum of Drudgery. No wonder even the most creative interior designers can't make a laundry look like anything other than a depressing hole.




You see? Your laundry can be the size of my living room and painted with liquefied Martha Stewart, and it'll still look like a bastion of chores and toil.


It took me a while, but I managed to unblock the drain, or at least make a tiny hole in the blockage that allows water to meander away at a slightly faster rate than evaporation. Then I audited everything in there, and took all the things I don't need to the spare room, to await my domestic Final Solution. Included in the cull were my spare ironing board (is there anything more depressing than the concept of a spare ironing board?) and an old melamine stereo cabinet inherited from an ex-flatmate (melamine has no place in my home, or indeed even in my vocabulary). Sadly the mop, the iron, the ladder, the rags and all the other accoutrements of the daily* domestic grind had to stay. Unless I want to end up awash in my own filth, like some sort of Anti-Howard Hughes, I need to keep them.


*or in my case weekly, monthly, or any indeterminate but embarrassingly longer period of time.