Moving experiences...

Things I covet: Jim Lawrence tassel

If someone bought your house, how would you leave it? Would you leave it clean and tidy? Perhaps you would add a note about how to turn things on and off and good wishes? Maybe you might even leave a bottle of bubbly and some flowers. A little something to say you cared and hoping that the next owner of your house enjoys it as much as you did.

Maybe you’d do none of the above and just shut the door on a chapter in your life. Being an Army Brat I was brought up to leave my lodgings spick and span. I have an abiding memory (although it may be erroneous) of watching my mother on her hands and knees scrubbing the kitchen floor in last ditch attempt to leave our Army Quarter ( military term for house) in Germany, spotless. Finished she closed the door and hassled us into the car where we awaited the Housing Officer to pass the property clean enough so we could leave.

I kid you not these guys would come with clipboards and white gloves to check absolutely everything. They would don white gloves to make sure you had cleaned everything properly, the door lintels the light switches, behind the cooker, under the fridge everywhere. I don’t remember what the penalties were for failing but as a child of eight or nine I got the impression they were dire indeed.

As an itinerant Student my landlords loved me such was the ingrained need to leave each lodging spotless, in fact there were times I felt that the property was left by me far better than when I arrived. I know that when I sold my flat the lucky girl who had bought it was dumbstruck at how clean it was left, so much so that she rang to thank me. So you may forgive me a little when I get righteously indignant when I hear of people leaving their homes in rather a poor state.

Friends of mine bought a beautiful house and moved in a few weeks ago. The couple who left, she an interior designer, were great. They took everything, virtually everything even though they were going into rented accommodation in the same village. They removed every light fitting, every fixed mirror, every flower pot (after dumping the surplus soil on the ground where the pots had previously stood); they even took the gas canisters that ran the hob breaking the connections so badly that new ones cannot be fixed. They took all the chopped wood. If they could I am sure they would have drained the oil – there again I am not sure that they did not.

However, they did leave behind filth, everywhere. Evidence of the great anger they obviously felt about leaving their home. They also left behind two pairs of curtains and told my friends so very magnanimously. I was immediately suspicious. If they had taken absolutely everything else that was not physically cemented to the floors of the house, why would thy leave the curtains behind? In fact when the negotiations were going on for the house my friends were offered all the curtains at a price way too steep for my friends to feel comfortable with, despite being told rather forcefully that the curtains were designer and that my friends should be so lucky to be offered said curtains.

We were shown proudly round the new home and I tried to avert my eyes from the dark patches in the carpet and the badly scraped walls, the piles of dust and ingrained dirt on the bannisters. We were shown the curtains.

“They aren’t our state but they aren’t so bad," said my friend, “just a little stained on the bottom.”

I pricked up my ears, stained? I said: "Let’s have a butchers..."

I approached the curtains already knowing what I would find. I gingerly picked one up

They were stained alright and also felt a bit damp too. I sniffed and staggered back a few paces. The bottom of the curtains were drenched in cat pee.

Now if the previous owners had just left the curtains and said nothing at all about them I would have just considered them filthy people with no sense of pride, but because they actually said they had left the curtains for my friends and they said it so magnanimously I can only say one thing what complete and utter prats and what a nasty thing to do, downright deliberately nasty. And remember this is an interior designer we are talking about, one who still has a business to run.

I must admit I did add after sniffing the curtains that it was blooming lucky they hadn’t opted to buy the rest of them!

Who does what in your home?

I have a feeling that although I complain a lot about my other half NOT doing anything round the house; I might have been exaggerating a bit. Why should I confess that? Well I have been watching the wonderful Who Does What? programme on BBC2 this evening as you do when you are waiting for Emmerdale to get going again after its dun dun dun break when it then tells you it will be back in half an hour.

Most sane people of course would be getting on with the laundry or else cooking their other half a three course cordon bleu feast. Not me I laze back in my chair pretend I haven’t seen the dog do by the fire in the other room and grab another glass of the good old Vino Plonko to accompany my mindless foray into mid-evening TV: the bit after the soaps but before the real drama of the night.

So there I am mindlessly zapping when I see it: A woman sitting on her bed laughingly with gritted teeth shrugging off the fact that HE seems to be enjoying chopping wood to keep the house heated at a balmy 13.5 degrees while she has to do everything else. And it struck a chord so I stopped zapping.

There he was pootling about in blissful ignorance of the fact that is long suffering wife was miserable and so would I be if I was kept that cold and had to do all the crappy jobs. Then it dawned on me, as it did on him, that if you land up doing all the crappy jobs in a marriage then you ain’t going to be that happy about it and may be a tad resentful.

Mostly I land up doing the boring crappy jobs because if I didn’t then they would never get done. So I do all the washing, cleaning, tidying up, letter writing, organisation, finance and weeding while he gets to play bonfires, driving the ride on mower, cooking and doing all the cool thing with eh boys like tennis, swimming, computer games and the like…

Not good.

One of the pundits on the show blamed this on further education for women which meant they were less likely to aspire to keeping their homes tidy. I put it down to the fact that blokes are better at ignoring everything they don’t like doing knowing that females will crack long before they do.

Before I got married Dear Charlie was a very house-proud man, he was also a very good ironer. When we got back from our honeymoon something changed and he became incapable of functioning on this level. He woke one mooring to ask me where his shirts were, I said I had no idea. He said where had I put his clean ones?

Me: “What clean ones?”

Him: “The ones you washed?”

Me, disliking his accusatory tone: “I haven’t washed any of your shirts, Darling

Him, glaring: “What do you mean you haven’t washed my shirts?”

“Well,” says I getting just a tad annoyed, “why should I wash your clothes? I send mine to the dry cleaners*….”

I think it was something we should have discussed before we got married.

Since that little fracas things have changed due to financial circumstances and the fact that there isn’t a decent pick up and return laundry and dry cleaning service in the outer reaches of East Anglia so I do all the laundry and farm out the ironing to the redoubtable Therese, I mean there is only so far I will go on this course of enforced drudgery. For the fact is although he does help out HE always gets to do what he likes while I do all the stuff I don’t like a bit like the couple in the programme.

I had to turn over before the end of the programme to carryon watching Emmerdale but it got me thinking perhaps if I cut down on the stuff I don’t like and delegated some of it perhaps I may get to do some things I do like and perhaps life would be a little more enjoyable?

Do you think you do all the crap jobs at home or are they more evenly divided?

*Please note at the time we both had full time jobs