Chats with mum

... she doesn't like much and has always been astonished at the sort of things other people are interested in. When the media was abuzz about a partial eclipse, she'd announce to whoever might be listening.

'I'm not interested in cullipses - it's so far up in the air'

 

My mother and I

were out and about in London  

at the pedestrian crossing we waited until the cars had stopped and the man turned green, by which time a crowd of impatient pedestrians had formed   

the cyclist - a man in his sixties - nearly ran us over because he was busy on his phone and hadn't noticed the lights  

a woman crossing with us said angry things to him   

mum thought people should take a more compassionate view 

there must've been something wrong with him - didn't you see he was talking to himself

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.