The wandering mind* went up late because the day before that, when I should have been finishing a blog post, I suddenly discovered I was going to have visitors the afternoon of the next day.**  Visitors, what’s more, whom I’ve known nearly forever, but who haven’t been to Scotland since I moved up here, & so have never seen this house.  YEEEEEEEP.  Whereupon I dropped everything*** & grabbed the nearest cleaning implement† & looked around for what to do first.  There are so many choices.

Most of them painful.  I have a variety of mantras on the subject of housecleaning.  Probably the most important is It would look a lot worse if I did as little as it looks like I do.  If you are going to collect little noodgy things—as a very old friend used to call them, & I still do—to the extent & with the fervour that I apply to their pursuit††, you are going to live a three-dimensionally complex life, full, very full, of small angled surfaces & eccentric bends & folds & curlicues that need dusting &, worse, over time, washing.  WASHING.  Because the dust, eventually, you know, starts to stick.  This is similar to my extreme revulsion against the idea of washing walls.  You don’t do anything on a wall, why should you have to wash it?†††  Why do I have to wash weird funky little objects for no other reason than that they’ve been occupying space on planet earth for a while?  Oh, don’t give me atmosphere, and the effects of respiration, both animal and plant, the sloughing off business all live bodies seem to feel obliged to do, skin flakes, hairs & crinkly brown leaves‡, all the stuff hanging in the air that is missing from the void that is deep space, except deep space is full of stuff too, right?  Including dust.  So little noodgy objects suspended in space also get covered in dust.  It’s a dispiriting‡‡ thought.  I bet they don’t get dusted either.  Like mine.‡‡‡   

And a special additional word about houseplants.  Houseplants are way messy. They don’t just sit there in their pots bringing joy &, cough cough, cleaner air.  They drop leaves & flowers & seeds & pollen & bits of stem & spathe-crumbs & all kinds of things that the houseplant books don’t tell you about.ɸ

ARRRRRRGH.

I have my limits however.  I go back to story-in-progress when the Ratbagging Ill Timed Late Night ME Energy Spike But We’ll Take Our Energy Spikes When We Get Them However Hard This Makes Living in the World, strikes, whatever is happening the next day ɸɸ.  And so only some of the floors were swept, only a few of the windows had the smudges wiped off ɸɸɸ, I never understand why plants are so smudgy;  yes of course if you have some kind of leaky-honeydew bug infestation, but when you don’t?  & you still get smudges on the insides of your windows?  Are they writing secret messages to the very-long-sighted houseplants in the house across the street? Ω  But the smears & smutches that look like, dunno, melted ice cream or baba ganoush or hollandaise sauce?  WHAT?  None of these things happen here anyway ΩΩ, let alone are carried nonchalantly through the house while flinging spoonfuls at the walls & windows.  I know myself well enough to keep all food items WITHIN the big kitchen-utility-living space with the Aga in the middle of it.  I don’t know, I think maybe the contents of any bowl or plate or mug I carry leaps outward, perhaps I inspire a sense of adventure in my ingestibles??  Or possibly my house has a lively social life when I’m not looking.  Okay, I do get very deeply involved when I’m working.  

& after all that, I forgot to remove the dead mouse in the middle of the floor of the potting shed/pantry-for-things-that-don’t-mind-uninsulated-damp ΩΩΩ, where the trap had somehow flung it.  Fortunately my guests didn’t ask for a tour.※

& it was a lovely visit.  I enjoyed it very much.※※

* * *

* . . . post.  The wandering mind is always with us.  Or me, anyway.

** I’m carefully not saying things like ‘Thursday’ or ‘two/three/four days ago’ because it won’t be by the time this post goes up.  I don’t really need any more reminders that I don’t live in time too well, but writing an erratic blog is certainly another one.  I’M MISSING THE TIME GENE, OKAY? 

*** Inappropriate verb choice.  Why did drop everything become standard slang for abruptly stop what you are doing to do something else really fast?  I yanked my hands off the laptop as if the keyboard were burning^, shoved (the front half of) Genghis off my lap^^ leaped to my feet & started clutching my forehead in despair & overwhelmedness.

^ I shouldn’t give this thing ideas.  I can hear it thinking, hmmm?  Burning keyboard?  We could work on that.

^^ moaning noises of protest ensue

† I have a surprisingly good selection of these.  It’s the employing them that’s the problem.  Also, I’m tired of buying the latest 1,000,000 5-star reviews on amazon gizmo that cleans EVERYTHING & finding out ***AMAZEMENT!!!*** that it doesn’t.  The most recent of these is another stiff narrow brush thing that is guaranteed to winkle out the sulky rubbish adhering to the bottom of the cracks in your old Victorian wooden plank floor:  wrong.  All it does is upset the silverfish & emerge, bent & broken, from the experience, adorned with substances you really didn’t need to know any more about beyond that you don’t want them in your house, even at the bottom of cracks in the floor.  What did those Victorians get up to??

†† Note, please, that we are not talking Dresden shepherdesses here, nor large-eyed children embracing larger-eyed cats.^  Anything with roses or dragons on it is in, & I will always make room for something truly exceptional, like my bright orange lobster salt & pepper shakers, which stand on their tails, & their claws are attached with small tight springs, so when you shake one the claws rattle at you.  I probably mentioned these in the old blog, they are too wonderful not to gloat over occasionally.  I mean, would you have passed these up^^ if you saw them on a shelf in a good old-fashioned junk shop, which I don’t think exist any more?  You’re not going to get the same awe-inspiring effect on eBay, even if someone posts a video.

^ Nor even basilisks, although I’d be tempted if it were a basilisk.  But I don’t do kiddies, full stop.  Nor the shepherds to go with the shepherdesses I don’t have.  I don’t do people.  Enough of the noisy, sloppy, mobile self-motivating ratbags around generally, I don’t freaking need freaking representations of them on my shelves.  I’m enough of a sample.

^^ If the answer is ‘yes’ I am very, very disappointed in you.

††† Barring dog-nose & small-child-hand height, which will need washing rather often.  Genghis likes to rub himself along the slightly knobbly inside wall of the tiny back hall, so that wall needs washing at dog-rubbing height too.  Sigh.  That wall is knobbly because it was originally part of the outside of the house before they built two little rooms, one up, one down, to put modern plumbing in.  About a hundred years ago.  Hey, it still works. 

‡ & crumbs, threads, tracked-in dirt, bits of paper & shreds of cardboard & string & incompetently peeled-off bits of tape, broken-off over-sharpened tips of old fashioned pencils which I still use^ & I’ve told you I don’t kill spiders, right?  So if there’s a live, functioning, bug-catching spider in that web, I leave it alone^^ & random effluvia probably better not further specified, like the Victorian detritus at the bottoms of the cracks in the floors.

^ partly because I seem somehow to have accumulated 1,000,000 of them & partly because I’m not a fan of modern mechanical pencils.+

+ what do you mean, why am I still using pencils?

^^ Granted I may leave it alone anyway.  I mean:  dusting. 

‡‡ ‡ DiSPIRITing.  Get it??

‡‡‡ You’ve already guessed that I am greatly attached to the notorious Quentin Crisp quote on not doing any housecleaning:  ‘after the first four years the dirt does not get any worse’.

ɸ I was just cruising a new houseplant site^ & they keep repeating:  ‘studies show that as little as 10 minutes spent in a room with real (not artificial) plants improves your overall mood.’  WHAT STUDIES are not cited.

^ My bad

ɸɸ or for that matter, should have already happened today

ɸɸɸ  yes, dog noses, of course, some of them, I swear, taller than Genghis can reach ^

^ oh, silly me.  Let us not forget that he can jump higher than my head, & regularly does so when I’m not getting his food bowl on the floor fast enough+.  I haven’t seen him leap gazelle-like & give his face a quick wipe along the wall at the top of the arc, but I wouldn’t put it past him.

+ Why he hasn’t yet cracked his head against the lower lean-to ceiling of the utility room, where Dog Food Happens, I have no idea

Ω  I have A Man in a Van with a Large Water Tank & a Rocket-Blast Hose that does the outside of the windows.^  I have a story about him.  Tell you later.

^ This will sometimes finally inspire me to remove some of the old, spiderless webs festooning the corners on the inside.  The best webs are full of corpses, you know?  & they do kind of catch the eye when you’re trying to look at the view.

ΩΩ no cow juice items;  no nightshades;  & hollandaise sauce is too much like work, & what do you do with all the egg whites?

ΩΩΩ I WILL HAVE the shed insulated.  Some day.  Yes.  Some day.  It was one of the things on the original renovations list, but I was tired of living in endless uproar & disintegration^ . . . & now, of course, the blasted shed has filled up with STUFF.  I have no idea how, since I certainly don’t put books back there.

^ & of freaking haemorrhaging money

※ They are so splendidly British.  Also, although they haven’t been to this house before, they are used to me. 

※※ I can’t speak for them, of course, but they did leave smiling.  Maybe they were being British.