Grubby

Today

Maybe it's because I cleaned my specs today or maybe it's the spring sunshine, but I've been noticing griminess today. The shower head was clogged with lime that had become rather grubby-looking, there was old tea ingrained into the teapot stand and the microwave plate looked far from clean. The morning sunshine revealed how smeared the windows are.

So I rubbed away, reflecting on just how much dirt we don't really notice.

In My Day

Growing up in London, I think I believed that dirt was actually simply a result of age. It didn't really occur to me to think that all dirt is caused by something.

The blackened buildings in London were just old, as was our ceiling at 4BH with its yellowy-brown stains. Dust also just appeared; it was made of nothing specific. This was quite a comfortable way of looking at things; the bottoms of saucepans weren't black from repeated exposure to flames and spilt food, they were just old.

As I grew up I began to see things differently. For one thing, the clean air act of 1963 relegated the London Smogs to the history books and I began to understand that the "age" on buildings was actually ingrained soot from millions of coal fires, couple with rain. Buildings were cleaned up, often revealing their full beauty for the first time in a hundred and fifty years. When I visited Mdina in Malta a few years ago the buildings, which are mostly much older than London's, were a lovely golden, never having had to deal with soot or much rain.

But still sometimes dirt builds up so slowly that we are not aware. Mamma was a forty Craven A a day smoker and I truly think she was unaware of how dirty this made everything. When she lived at Dorking she had a problem with foundations that meant that all her furniture had to be stored. Paul and I helped to put it all back.

"This TV's pretty grubby, Mamma", I said. Mamma protested that she'd dusted it before it had gone into store. "Well", I said, demonstrating with a soapy cloth "it's covered in a brown sticky film, I'm surprised you could watch TV; it must have been sepia!" Her books, too, all had yellowed spines. In vain for her to protest that that was the effect of age. "I have books that are much older", I said, exasperated "and they're not yellowed.  It's tar from your cigarettes." But she wasn't convinced.

What is true is that no amount of scrubbing will ever remove all the grubbiness of living, although I presently have a very shiny bathroom.