Monday, June 09, 2014

Too Posh to Wash

Today

Whilst having supper tonight I joked about some of the food having been on the kitchen floor. "That's OK", said Paul "I'll scrape out the spiders and bugs.. " "Well", I said "Why don't we just embrace upper class squalor?" "I think we have", responded my spouse.

In My Day

Noticing and caring about cleaning up stuff is a very middle-class virtue, I think. There are truly some people so posh that they don't notice trivial things like dirt.

One summer, about 1997 or so, Becky had Summer jobs as a Nanny. One of these took her to an Exmoor farmhouse where a couple with an unpronounceable Balkan surname lived. He was something in the City, she was an artist of sorts, and they were awaiting the arrival of child number two.

The whole exciting story of baby two's arrival on the sitting room floor is Becky's to tell. However, we became involved because the rough drive to the farmhouse which was all right for their 4X4, slaughtered the subframe of Becky's little Metro. So we ferried her down weekly.

The farmhouse certainly had Thomas Hardy charm. It also had Thomas Hardy filth. In fact, probably more than it would have done in Hardy's day, when people slaved night and day with brooms and hot water and soap. The quarry tiled kitchen floor had probably not seen soap and hot water for about a hundred years. Food vied with mud, doggy footprints and other unmentionables. We gingerly sat down on some greasy chairs and made polite small talk and admired the baby, wondering how soon we could escape.

It's not as though they displayed even the tiniest bit of embarrassment ("Sorry about the mess" etc etc) and they were certainly able to afford a cleaner;  they were simply above that sort of thing. I immediately dubbed their lifestyle "Upper Class Squalor"

 Becky always said that after the new baby was born on the sitting room floor there was a suspicious stain on the carpet that was never cleaned up, but more importantly, was simply never mentioned. 

Thinking about that has made me determined to steam clean the kitchen floor at the first opportunity Oh, and none of the food had actually been on the floor.

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