My Lovely Horse

 

 

July is the month for horse-cleaning.  I join in with the annual re-whitening of the Uffington horse in Oxfordshire. The horse was created possibly three thousand years ago by digging a 2 metre deep trench and then filling it with chalk. It's hard to express my wonderment at this monument, how did they dig those trenches (probably slaves). How was it designed, the horse is so big that when you're working on it it's hard to remember which bit of the body you're on. 

 

Is the creature actually a horse? there's whiskers on it's face - referred to as the  'beak' which only makes sense when you hear that an excavation in the '90s revealed that the whiskers had originally been a metre longer. The 'horse' has changed over the millenia by encroaching turf which is why the beak isn't very beaky. It had been noted that the rate of turf-encroament meant that the lines around it's head would disappear completely in a few years. Which is why this year we helped an archeological team to restore the lines to an earlier width.

One of the team brought along horsey tattoos for us all - I might make mine permanent.

Spider with Yumen Zed

Yesterday I passed a man telling a small boy that he was 'getting spider with yuman zed' -  my first thought was that this was must be a new and interesting foodstuff - maybe on the takeaway menu at Wagamama. Lockdown has made me obsess about food even more than usual so it was a bit disappointing to realise a few seconds later that the man was actually telling the boy that he would be getting 'a spider with a human head' and I think that sounds too big to eat. 

Maybe I'm just making up excuses,  I buy sheep and deer from the butcher, I hardly think a human-headed spider would be much bigger than these creatures, if they do arrive on the market, portion size is probably not going to be the main issue.

 

In other news

This morning I set fire to the vaccuum cleaner after hoovering up warm ashes - the smell was far worse than I could've imagined

I still swim in the sea but only for 5 minutes because it's reached the sort of cold that makes a person go completely crispy  - in the way of those lettuces that get stuck at the back of a fridge

A dog fox has been patrolling our neighbourhood every night for the last week making a noise that sounds like a queaky-toy

 

 

 

 

 

 

We're just about getting on top of the cleaning

A month ago builders came to smash down a stone wall outside our back door, as there was nobody inside the house they didn't think there was any need to shut the back door while they were working, so when I arrived home two weeks ago our home had been turned into the Sahara with drifts of sand reaching up to the top of the house.

Last week The Man arrived from Mongolia with bags of torn trousers and many types of thermal underwear, including woolly longpants  so heavy that I can't lift them on my own. These articles have been in a production line of washing and draping to dry then sorting into drawers or piles for mending.

I might have already mentioned that I am very keen on mending. I have a Massive Fan Girl crush on Celia Pym who currently has work in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Celia is a textile artist who specialises in visible mending, she also trained as a nurse, inviting hospital staff to bring loved but worn or broken items to the anatomy department, she mended them and this became an exhibition.

Visible mending shows the patterns of wear, the way that our clothes work with our bodies, how these and our bags, shoes or clothes become extensions of us - if these things are good at keeping us warm/dry/comfortable/happy then, like a beloved body part, they should be maintained for as long as possible.

A chaser is

1. a person or thing that chases

2.  a drink drunk after another drink of a different kind,  

other things are chasers but they don't interest me, I was thinking of the first two when I agreed to go and help monitor a 'Submarine Chaser'*

I was expecting a sleek metallic shark-like beast, ageing gracefully on the river. Instead I found boat become river bank, a woody container of mud with prickly plants and a tree growing in/on it. 

Twelve women clanked across the river bed with buckets and brushes, following the Man-who-loves boats, struggling and sometimes failing to stay upright as our boots sucked us into the  stinky Thames mud. We located the boat's remains then arranged ourselves around it to wipe away mud from it's edges, mud that will be redeposited in a few hours - a Sisiphean parody of housewifery.

The Chaser served in World Wars I and II and was part of the Normandy Landings. For post-war civilian life, the big engines were replaced with a neutered set, someone added a dinky cabin, it became a houseboat, then abandoned, then moored up to die at a boatyard in Isleworth where it made a nuisance of itself banging around on the tide so it was holed to shut it up. Now it is visited every year by the Man-who-loves-boats and a cleaning lady army to stroke it lovingly, photograph that year's state of decay and then leave it for another year.

*as a newly trained foreshore archeological monitor. I need monitoring practise and also I need reminding how shallow and easily bored I am.

Accumulations

turquoise is loneliness - wendy walgate

The days have been doubled up busy - painting and clearing out the Brain Surgery, tidying the community garden and making-lists for the annual cooking-with-music event.

Nooks and hidey-holes in the Brain Surgery are stuffed with accumulations. I sort and make collections of things that go together and make homes for them. The sorting and collecting and homing has infected me.

I dreamt about a vast bed in a dark wooden room, a high four-poster stacked with many layers of mattresses and pillows, filed in between them are dozens of sleeping labrador puppies, black ones and yellow ones. I patrol the bed pulling out a floppy hibernating puppy here and there, checking it's breathing before slipping it back in place and continuing my rounds. Also, in the interstices of the bed frame are tiny wooden tubes, each containing a bee which need regular, gentle watering.

Then Lennie Kravitz came into the room - I didn't want him to know about the puppies

Lacy Flaps

Space Lady was wearing her biggest woolly diving suit today, we waded around her house to see if we could find the ironing board - the furniture and floor are obscured by mounds of things so it's standing room only.

I tried to call to say that there is no water so there's no point in you coming

I won't stay long then

Will you iron this impossible thing

OK

The impossible thing was laundered but the cats had been sitting on it so I ironed over a lot of cat hair and footprints and other fluff from the floor, there were a lot of lacy flaps and the thing took an hour to make more or less flat - it would have taken half that but Space Lady stood very close and told me about the squatters who have moved into the church next door and I was trying not to burn her.

The estate agent rang to say that it's my fault the squatters are there she says that she has been and looked through the keyhole and can see them taking the organ apart and setting fire to it but there is no keyhole and you couldn't see into the church from the door even if there was

Pant-watching

Today's future from Miranda July ...


what have we learned about pants? 
1) many things look better  inside of them, and 
2) therefore you should calm down.

I have just had a long phone call with a long lost friend which was wonderful and sad at the same time

Yesterday I was given some chocolates filled with liquid espresso coffee which aren't very nice until you drop them into a cup of hot coffee to make a pool of mocha at the bottom of the cup - as soon as I had done this I  was distracted by a phone call  and forgot about the chocolate/espresso bomb so it was like a surprise bonus.


I did my weekly hoovering for the tidy-elderly people today and noticed some hand-written instructions near the computer.


I MUST ALWAYS
• turn the computer off properly USING 'SHUT DOWN'
• put junk mail  in 'trash'
• delete the things that I want to keep for later and might need (put in junk)

I asked the tidyelderlyman if this was a real instruction

Yes it is ... I had a crash and an expert came and told me to do these things

You might have misunderstood - maybe you could check with him

I can't really understand anything he says ... I ask him to repeat everything five times and then I give up.


That is exactly what happens to me when I meet computer experts

Wet Wet Wet

Image 1953 Peter Stackpole

Harsh loud hail waking me at night    rainy monotony during the day   cold weather coming

Space Lady day today: we sit opposite each other at the dining table and polish arcane silverware, she tells me complicated stories while Cellar Man fusses in the kitchen – long ago, to reduce frivolous water consumption, he removed one of the tap tops, today he  has removed the other one so water can only be obtained by means of a monkey wrench.

My charity shop unknittings have yielded about a jumperful of wool, all of it slightly different shades of cream, they make each other look dirty so I have been saving my used teabags to dye the skeins.  Some has turned a beautiful golden colour but the larger part of it looks like old meat. I have re-dyed the old meat wool with aubergine colour and it is now divine.

Job Titles

On Tuesday mornings I visit an elderly couple: I arrive, we exchange a little light banter, I don’t see them again for the duration of my visit.

There is actually nothing for me to do in this large detached house, it is completely neat and dust-free. 

Last week as I was leaving, I mentioned their tidiness and she said Oh we don’t want our mess to get in the way of your work, which puzzled me as I imagined myself to be their cleaner.

Today, for two hours, I walking around, up and down the stairs, plugging and unplugging the hoover, opening and closing doors and I suddenly saw myself clearly; less hairy than a cat, less needy than a dog, less trouble than guests but nevertheless a living thing, moving around in their big big house. 

Can’t decide whether to think of myself as a part-time pet or a performance artist.




A few days ago I attended a talk at the Wilderness Society given by an 'explorer',  a young man with romantic-but-ill-researched notions of crossing deserts.

Women NEVER call themselves explorers.

Except Dora

Stuffed

 

our need for consolation is insatiable - Stig Dagerman

first I visited the woman-who-can't-fold-things, for her I folded a sofaload of clean clothing.

then I took a dog for a walk, both the owners work full time.

alfie lives in a kitchen that is ten thousand times too small for him in  a full-to-bursting flat made from the edge of a bigger house, furniture escaping from rooms and cats climbing out of windows  -  we had our walk and then I wrestled him back into his cell - I have become embroiled in a hostage situation.

image: set for Addams Family

Silver-tongued

Space Lady was wearing clothes today and an entire room had been made visible. I took a broom and swept the ceiling then we both sat down. A  small beige plastic telly on a mountain of beta tapes showed a silent rerun of Heartbeat. I cleaned silver while Space Lady kept up a running commentary. The wideness of the pickle forks and the smallness of the cake forks provoked pictures in my head. The Man-in-the-cellar was out stealing wood.

Leave Space Here

Today Space Lady booked me to work for her, she is wearing her giant romper suit and gravity boots which is a bad sign. We navigated her crowded house with difficulty, trying to decide where to clear space so that she could have a visitor and as many as two people could sit. There was the usual failure of nerve - it was decided that I should spend the rest of the session listening to the Goon Show with her instead.

Space Lady has a large house and it is impossible to get through the door of most of the rooms. There was a room full of dead fridges and microwaves which I cleared last year, but this drew attention to the bay window which is peeling off the front of the house and the window panes which are zigzagged with lightening cracks stuck over with electrical tape.

Space Lady has a husband who has chosen to live in the cellar.

Folding Lady

My lack of ability as a cleaning lady has selected out a very particular sort of clientele, such as elderly people who do their own cleaning (see previous post) but want someone to come by once a week to check that they are still alive then help them turn on the computer and reach down a jar of pickles.

A woman with aspergers syndrome texts me once every couple of months. A large portion of her tiny flat is taken up with enormous recycling bins that separate glass, cardboard and plastic. When they are full she starts piling boxes and tins on top of the bins. At the point that she fears getting trapped underneath an avalanche she sends a text in a state of panic about the situation. Cardboard boxes in need of flattening occupy the sofa and the bathroom contains a large bucket full of cardboard loo roll inners. Somehow she can cope with her other rubbish but not this ... this needy waste. The other issue here are the clothes racks which tower like pylons behind the sofa and in front of the tv, piled with clean laundry, it just needs folding - and folding is something she can’t do.

Theories of Relativity: i

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My current career as a domestic cleaner is a family joke, visiting my house is a bit like entering a crime scene. I'm myopic so don’t notice dust and can't see details on far away places like the floor.  Sometimes (when a visitor is imminent) I do a speedy swab across the decks, merely making things worse, I am effectively smearing dirt and consolidating several piles of jumble  which only serves to draw attention to our sorry state.

It has long been apparent that any housework done in my own home is an unrewarding task, within hours the house reverts to it's default state of messiness. This is in stark contrast to the home of an elderly couple where I visit once a week for vacuuming duties, their home is identically neat from one week to the next - they leave exactly 12 crumbs under the dining table to check that I do actually push their Hoover around - but nothing else shifts or changes. I imagine them living in this house, gently reading the papers or a book until it is time to move to another room, drifting through the house in a manner that won’t dislodge any hair or skin flakes.

I have met  another artist who earns her living as a cleaner, we’d both like our homes to be neater but are equally ineffective at achieving this, we suggested that perhaps it would be more interesting if we did each other's housework*. The problem with this plan is that it still involves time spent doing housework, we will call the idea Art and file under ‘conceptual’.

*actually I refuse to own the housework, my house is shared with another who deserves equal opprobrium for the mess in which we find ourselves

House Music

My daily life is mostly occupied with cleaning people's homes. Pointing at and exclaiming about the things that interests me in these places might be considered impolite so instead I have taken inspiration from this verbatim poem and composed my own list of names for the places I have visited over the last six months.

House with many wind apertures

House of hairy dolls

New baby, zombie lady house

Pants on floor house

House of love and frayed carpets

Sticky wall house

House with no place for bottom or cup of tea

House of many cushions

House where big man sleeps

House for lady in bunny suit

House like grandma’s

House where man consider ending life

Jobs

... the next time I visited  the cat house, the cats kept out of my sight. I cleaned the living room and moved on. Glancing into the living room on my way out I noticed that a clutch of enormous turds had recently been laid on the carpet in the window bay.

Twice a week I go to a house with dogs and a little boy who calls me Harry because that is the name of his friend.

I spend an hour a week in a house where I have never seen the owner, he called me and asked if I did ironing, I said not really because I wasn't very good at it and I worried that I might do more harm than good, the man said 'What if I didn't care', then he dropped his keys off in my letter box and leaves me cash in his microwave every fortnight.

I have recently started cleaning a sexndrugsnrocknroll house. It is the sort of place where it is difficult to tell what colour the paintwork might originally have been but I'm guessing they had a lot of fun getting it this dirty. They don't want me to come very often and they're too stoned to care what I clean.  I choose something that I can complete in a session. The first week I concentrated on a glazed door between the kitchen and living room. After two hours with a scourer and some Ajax I had uncovered a very bright and shiny thing indeed, I imagined them coming home and thinking that a celestial Tardis had been installed.

The Boys Are Back In Town

... I was saying to my friend Eryl
The manly tide has now risen beyond our armpits, the crew swooped home from a filming trip a few days ago, Miss Whiplash and I are doing the doggypaddle in a testosterone-and-pelican-case sea.

So I visited my parents for a dose of normal life.

My mother likes things neat, there isn't quite enough to dust at home so, despite being a card-carrying atheist, she is on the church-cleaning rota and goes along once a month to help polish the church knobs, I have been told that the village vicar is a particularly rebarbative lady.

We went along to the local pub, my mother exchanged gossip with the barmaid. For long minutes Dad and I listened to the details of Mrs Welling's kitchen refit and Miriam down-the-road who had gone to stay with her daughter for a few days, then there was quite a story about a broken washing machine. Finally both women stroked their chins reflectively while trying to think of more news, the barmaid said

well, that's about it, I don't think there's anything else to report


Mum said .... there's the vicar's marriage

WHAT!!!!

last month - she was stuck at an airport because of the volcano dust and met a man, they can't keep their hands off each other, they're getting married. She announced it from the pulpit last Sunday.

How Much Housework Is Too Much?

I thought I knew about obsessive housekeepery, I was raised in the sort of house where your coffee cup was whipped away for washing up the second you set it down - finished or not and we warned visitors not to stay too still if they didn't want to get dusted. My parents also like taking pre-emptive action against mess and wear, when I visited them over the weekend I admired my mother's ingenious Bacofoil candlestick protectors – no unsightly wax drips in that house!

I am serving out my final days at The Crazy White House (an average-sized 4-bedroom house, occupied by two adults and two children) which appears to exist solely for the purpose of being cleaned - I am wondering if it is, in fact an art piece or a scientific experiment that is secretly being filmed in timelapse to see how long it takes to polish, hoover and wash a house away. This is the regime:

Every day: at 7.30am Nadia arrives, she does breakfast and starts cleaning the house, she is there for 12 hours, by the time I arrive at 3pm she has started the second floor washing of the day.

Every Friday: a second cleaner arrives for the day and the house gets extra cleaning

Every Wednesday and Thursday afternoon: someone comes to do laundry

One of the reasons I am leaving the CWH job is that I fear that I have either fallen into a hallucinatory parallel universe or gone snow blind; every night before I go home I look around the kitchen, I have cleaned and scrubbed and swept the floor - it looks, to my eyes, dazzlingly new. After my first week Nadia said to me

You must make the kitchen cleaner before you go at night, I only have an hour and a half to clean the kitchen in the mornings when I come in.

Bringing It All Back Home

The Director is back from filming in Botswana, most of the kit is in storage but the lenses are up in the spare room for testing and cleaning. He's mostly been asleep since his return, which is a shame as I was hoping he might do some Man Jobs, like get the congealed fat out of the drain.


He's hoping I'll do some Woman Jobs, like fix all the broken trousers that are in his clothes bag. I won't be doing that because I'll have my arm down a drain, but I will model the trousers that show what happens if you stand too close to the camp fire.

Rubbery Cleaners Revisited

In the mornings, on her way in to work, Miss Whiplash brings us excellent coffee from the lesbian café near the office.

These days it's just the two of us in the office - everyone else is away filming. Whiplash spends half her time nagging a television company to cough up long overdue payments and the rest of her time is spent trying to reassure our creditors. I talk about biscuits and help think of ways to raise finance. In the absence of people I have noticed that enormous dust bunnies have been breeding under the desks,  I’m also thinking of ways to brighten our lives a little.

I do the afternoon coffee run. yesterday, three closely shorn women were sitting outside the café arguing about the qualities they’d be looking for in a nude cleaning person, I don’t think I’d like a completely unclothed person cleaning around me but fancy dress could be diverting. I remembered the ad for rubber cleaners that I’d spotted earlier in the year - I’m still a bit confused about who pays who, but it has occurred to me that if I get it the right way round I could kill several birds with one stone.

I kicked myself for not asking the lesbians where their fetish staff come from, but I had noticed that the café advertises communal stitching afternoons (an activity that has flourished in this city while I’ve been away). I decided to join in and see if I could infiltrate their intelligence network.

As it turned out, communal stitching is not attended by the lesbian community, it was full of girls who like kittens and sparkly things - I have returned knowing far more about knitting gonks than I did before - my quest for a cleaner has not advanced.