How to Get Things Really Flat: Enlightenment for Every Man on Ironing, Vacuuming and Other Household Arts
240
How to Get Things Really Flat: Enlightenment for Every Man on Ironing, Vacuuming and Other Household Arts
240eBook
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Overview
For many reasons, men often neglect housekeeping chores—even when they share the house with other humans who wish they could get some help in that department. How to Get Things Really Flat combines witty observations, true tales of family life, useful information that takes the mystery out of such phenomena as dishwashers and vacuums, and answers to timeless questions including:
- When dusting, where does the dust go?
- What is the worst thing that can happen while ironing?
- Is housework therapeutic?
- How can I impress people with bicarbonate of soda?
- Aren’t men supposed to be dirty?
- And more!
“A delightfully amusing tale about the joys and tribulations of doing housework that also serves as a very good primer on how to actually do housework . . . His main target audience is men. But women, I think, will also find Martin’s observations funny and many of his tips helpful . . . And if, after laughing your way through Martin’s text, you’re still not into doing housework, he has a tip for that, too: Hire a cleaner.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Martin’s lighthearted but quite handy guide looks at the reasons why men don’t help out around the house as much as they ought to and proposes what can be done about that . . . After reading this offbeat and thoroughly delightful guide to housework, it’s hard to imagine anyone not wanting to give this stuff a try. Martin does what your mother never could: he makes doing chores seem fun, exciting, and rewarding.” —Booklist
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781615191086 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Experiment |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 601 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Why Do Housework?
Sorry to insist upon this point, as it may seem rather maudlin and Dickensian of me, but my mother did die when I was quite a young boy, whereupon York City council supplied my father with a "home help" to assist with the housework. She was called, somehow aptly, Mrs. Buffard, and she came on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. She was a very jolly woman and I liked having her around, but what I particularly liked was the state of the house just after she'd left it. It was clean and tidy, and seemed sunnier. There was mysterious, rather beautiful midnight-blue stuff in the toilets (Harpic, as I am now able to deduce). I knew that after one flush the blue stuff in the toilet would be gone, and I'd defer peeing to keep it there.
Mrs. Buffard made my bed so neatly that I would try to slide into it without disrupting it, and my aim was to get out of a made bed in the morning. In my bedroom, the window would be left slightly open for the purposes of airing, and my Whizzer and Chips and Beano comics all looked much more plausible, more intellectual somehow, when marshaled into neat piles. I noticed that Mrs. Buffard left the tea towel hanging on the kitchen washing line, and I would marvel at this: I'd never thought of hanging it up like that. I'd thought I was doing everybody a favor by folding it up into a square about six inches wide after using it. She would also leave the dishcloth hanging over the two kitchen taps to dry, which I thought was a decorative touch; I didn't realize at the time that this was good hygienic practice, since bacteria thrive on moisture.
When Mrs. Buffard had finished with the house, it was all ready for living in. A clean house was a suitable basis for getting things done. I would try to invite my friends around shortly after she'd left — not quite while she was there, because it was slightly shameful to have a home help. It implied helplessness. But my friends, whether through diplomacy or ignorance, would refer to Mrs. Buffard as "your cleaner," just as though we paid for her services, and I wouldn't go out of my way to correct this misapprehension.
I knew that Mrs. Buffard came, in some way, from the government, and it was rather worrying that they — or it — should have thought it necessary to send her. For a year or so after my mother's death, I'd noticed people furtively congratulating my father on keeping the family together, on "keeping the children on," which was alarming and made me think that this decision of his might be reversible. Even with Mrs. Buffard's help, it might all suddenly become too much for him, and he might decide to do whatever was the opposite of keeping us on. Seeing my father in close conversation with another adult, I would sidle up alongside, just in case he was saying, "I've found a very good orphanage for Andrew ... a very smart uniform, all mod cons, and reasonable visiting hours."
This was partly why I began to do some of the housework myself. I instituted a nightly routine. Coming home from school, I'd wash any dishes left over from breakfast, wipe down what I did not then call "the kitchen surfaces," hang the tea towel over the kitchen line, and leave the dishcloth strung across the taps à la Mrs. Buffard. I'd run over the living room with the Ewbank (carpet sweeper), take the dustpan and brush to the area beneath the canary's cage, shake the hearth rug in the garden (indeed, so vigorously that the backing would repeatedly fall off), and straighten the antimacassars on the chairs. Only then could I sit down and watch children's TV.
I started doing that when I was ten. At age eleven, I duly failed my Eleven Plus and went to a secondary modern school, which taught practical skills to ready its pupils for careers in the industry that, as it turned out, Mrs. Thatcher would shortly come along and abolish. The boys did a lot of metalwork and woodwork; the girls did cookery and needlework. For one experimental term, these roles were reversed and — in what was probably the most momentous single school lesson I ever attended — a Mrs. Davies taught me how to cook an omelet and an apple crumble and custard. (Didn't hang about, that Mrs. Davies.) I should think that I've cooked an average of two omelets a week ever since. Apple crumbles I knock off less often, but it's what you'll have for pudding if you come to dinner here.
I found a freedom in the kitchen, whether cooking or cleaning. It was a place where you could be with no questions asked. I believe that my father felt the same. We were both antisocial, and one thing about housework ... it gets you out of talking to people. (See chapter 4: Washing Up.) Also, kitchen work, far from being a sort of domestic imprisonment, made me feel free: an independent unit, as the Edwardians used to say. I could "manage"; I could look after myself, and if I could do it in this one house, then I could do it in any other.
As I reached young manhood, some of my male friends "came out" — on school camps, in student digs, and so on — as people who couldn't cook, and I remember the shrill, panicking tone of a friend who said he wouldn't be taking his turn at the cooker in the shared holiday home because he didn't know how. Later, at university, I would note the shamefaced look on my friends' faces as, at the end of term, they loaded a mountain of dirty laundry into Mummy's car. This was completely incompatible with the swaggering persona they presented every day in the junior common room.
Today I often meet men who proudly declare that they never do any housework, while their wives muster strange, forced, curdled smiles in the background. The existence of these men seems to me unreal. They are living on borrowed time, desperately vulnerable and poised for disaster, like those cartoon characters who've run off the edge of a cliff and not realized. But I know they're about to find out at any minute ... when their wives leave them, I mean. Dr. Gatrell, author of Hard Labour, observed in her interviewees that "the domestic division of labour became a serious issue following the birth of the first child," and when I spoke to her she told me that the second time it becomes a big issue is "during divorce proceedings."
But I do not seek to present myself as a domestic paragon. The domestic scenes of my early manhood were pure Withnail and I squalor for years on end-a testament to the power of the human immune system. And when I got married in my midthirties, the familiar discrepancy appeared between me and my wife.
Here was a woman — a journalist — who had once been late for an important meeting with her editor (he was threatening to sack her), having been unable to leave the house without first making her bed and tidying the kitchen, even though she was well aware of having overslept. (She did get sacked, but a bit later on.) My wife has very high standards when it comes to washing up, tidying up, and bathroom and kitchen cleanliness. She's also very keen — much to my secret satisfaction — that the house should look right, and there's an element of skillful stage dressing to her tidying up. Her attitude toward housework is based on aesthetics rather than an obsessive-compulsive desire to disinfect everything in sight. But while I did more housework than the average man, we would still have rows about it, especially after the boys were born. Or the arguments wouldn't be about housework to begin with, but they'd soon get there. "This week," my wife would say, "I've done the shopping, put in three loads of laundry, spent five hours ironing all the clothes including yours, made breakfast every day and the evening meal most days; I've vacuumed twice, mopped the kitchen floor ..."
For a man, there is no "Yes, but ..." after that. You've lost the argument, however reasonable the point you might have been trying to make in the first place.
I turned over the problem in my mind for a long time. What were the known parameters? My wife did about four times more housework than I did. It was obviously getting her down, since she also did — and does — work a full-time job. More important, it was getting me down, too. The feelings of guilt; the lack of bargaining power; the sense of being a spare part, of aspiring to an anachronistic male role ... What to do? The answer came to me one Sunday evening.
That was my evening for going off to the pub for a couple of pints. It was also the evening that my wife did the ironing, usually in front of the costume drama on TV, and we would coincide somewhere near the front door shortly after the children had gone to bed: she would be approaching the living room, her upper body entirely hidden behind a stack of ironing; I would be rounding up the sports sections of the papers in order to read them in the pub.
On this particular Sunday, as I opened the door, and called out my habitual, "See you a bit later, then," I noticed a certain lack of enthusiasm in her habitual "Have a nice time." As I wandered over to the pub, I thought this over: perhaps it was just that her voice had been muffled by all the laundry she'd been carrying as she spoke — it had toppled over onto her face somewhat — or perhaps it was just the strain of lifting it.
I had a particularly meditative couple of pints in the pub, and I hardly touched those sports sections. On returning to the house, I entered the living room, took off my coat, sat down, and said, "I've something to tell you."
"Yes?" she said, a little alarmed as she aligned the creases on a pair of my trousers.
"I've decided to take over the ironing," I said.
For a while she just eyed me suspiciously.
"All of it?" she said.
"All of it."
"Good," she said.
But she seemed a bit shell-shocked.
"I'm not letting you do the napkins," she said, after a while.
I explained to her that she was obviously like those institutionalized prisoners who wouldn't take their opportunity for freedom when it came.
"No, it's not that," she said. "I just don't trust you with the napkins."
"Don't you want me to do the ironing?"
"Of course I do ... of course I do."
It was all very low key, as important pivotal moments often are. We just both knew it was the right thing, and there was nothing further to say.
It was one of the best decisions I've ever made, and I commend it to my readers. If anything, I go to the pub more now than I used to, feeling guilt free and often leaving a pile of freshly if not particularly well-pressed clothes in my wake. My wife's "Have a nice time" has regained its merry ring, not least because I have branched out from ironing to doing the laundry, or "washing the clothes," as I like to call it. This happened because the iron, I discovered, was kept near the washing machine, and when I squared up to this contraption I saw it was not quite so complicated as I had always suspected. I have developed a basic method of washing the clothes, which leaves them definitely cleaner than they were before (I will put it no higher than that), and which I will outline in the next chapter.
Mindful of the lightened mood in the house that resulted from my work in these areas, I rediscovered my boyhood enjoyment of vacuuming, becoming — if I do say so myself — something of a specialist with the aforementioned crevice attachment (See chapter 5: Vacuuming). I now quite often clean the bath and have even dabbled in toilet cleaning. For several weeks — until my wife reclaimed the job on the grounds that "there's never any food in the house" — I did the family shopping, and for a couple of those weeks, I think I did the job exceptionally well. (There was food in the house — it just wasn't necessarily food that anybody wanted to eat.)
It would be hubristic, and possibly wrong, to say that we argue less. To some extent we just argue about different, more worthwhile things, and, because the moral imbalance has been partly redressed, I win more often than I used to.
CHAPTER 2Doing a Wash
WHY WASH THE CLOTHES?
You should do the washing because you can, because it is so easy compared with how things were. A hundred years ago, laundry took up the entirety of Monday at the very least. It was considered decadent to leave it until late in the week, and also impractical. An old bit of Yorkshire philosophy runs: "Them as wash on Monday have the whole week to dry." It was still labor intensive enough in the 1960s when, as a boy, I would watch my mother do the job.
The washing machine was an ugly, jaundiced-looking thing perched on high wheels and bearing the grandiose legend "Made for English Electric by ACME" (or was it the other way around?). It was not plumbed in like the modern machines, but had to be dragged over toward the kitchen sink, where it was filled from a rubber hose connected to the faucet. As the machine throbbed away, boiling the water, the kitchen filled with steam, and everything conspired to make a melancholy mood: the feeble chirpiness of Jimmy Young on Radio Two; the rain falling outside and all but falling inside as well; the fact that it was Monday; the fact that because the washing was going on, nothing else could be going on, therefore lunch was likely to be canned spaghetti on toast.
When the clothes had been washed ... well, that was only the beginning. My mother would haul them out of the machine with wooden tongs, which had been bleached to the color of bone by immersion in boiling water, and then push them up the little steel slope toward the mangle that was attached to the machine. Sometimes I was allowed to help feed the clothes into the mangle. I liked doing that. The mangle rollers were omnivorous and always hungry. You only needed to snag the tiniest corner of a garment between the rollers for it to be eagerly taken up. But I knew it was dangerous work, and my mother stood over me as I did it. The mangle, like bleach, was one of the dangerous emanations of housework. I knew of a boy who'd somehow gotten his arm caught in the mangle, so that the skin around his elbow was all crumpled up. (At least, he said he'd got his arm caught in the mangle, but it occurs to me all these years later that this might just have been his way of glamorizing a birthmark or skin condition.)
The traumatized, mangle-flattened clothes were then carried directly out to dry on the line — until about 1970, when we acquired a spin-dryer. With this ferocious, dwarfish machine, you clamped down the lid and then placed a bucket by the outlet pipe to catch the water that would be spun out of the clothes. The water didn't come immediately, and waiting for it was like waiting for somebody to be sick. You then had to whip the bucket away, because as it reached the climax of its spinning, the dryer would have an epileptic fit, juddering about the room with such terrifying violence that as a child I would not be alone in the kitchen with it. (When my mother died and my father took over washing the clothes, he would quite often quell the thing by sitting on it, sometimes while reading the paper.)
Without a spin-dryer, drying the clothes was easier said than done in rainy Yorkshire. On a wet day, some clothes would be placed on the wooden drying rack, which could be raised or lowered on a pulley from the kitchen ceiling like a flat in the theater. Alternately, the clothes were loaded onto our two wooden clotheshorses and placed around the gas miser.
On a fine day, it was my job to take the wet laundry into the back garden and hang it on the line. Having finished the job, I would proudly raise the level of the clothesline with a wooden clothes prop, like a soldier raising a flag after victory in a battle (though of course the ironing was still to be done).
Today, washing machines are plumbed in, so you don't have to haul them over to the sink before using them. They are operated at the flick of a couple of buttons, and the spin cycle does the job of the old, manic spin- dryers. You can fill the machine, select from various settings, and switch it on while waiting for your tea to steep. So it does seem churlish not to put in a load occasionally, especially since you're only going to be doing a wash, and not doing "the laundry."
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DOING A WASH AND DOING THE LAUNDRY?
Some people — and by "people" I mean "women" — are really into doing "the laundry," which is not so much a single job as a regime that can eat up most of the week. It is as if they are determined that the invention of the computerized washing machine should not bring them any significant saving of time. Let's look at the difference between doing the laundry and doing a wash.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "How to Get Things Really Flat"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Andrew Martin.
Excerpted by permission of The Experiment Publishing.
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