Steadily the tension and the mountain grew until I had to do something, something called a ‘load‘….Then I was caught in the headlights.
For reasons that are known only to Mrs Stimp and millions of others, there are two boxes of washing powder of different brands near the washing machine, both open and ready to be scooped. I couldn’t be troubled with the small print so it boiled down to a Stimple choice, one based on an irrelevance of colour or shape, still nothing between them as washing powder doesn’t have a shape and they both seemed to be flecked with specks of blue so I had to waste yet more time still on this quandary. You might think an obvious preference could be based on fragrance, but they both smelt like sweets quickly unwrapped on a January afternoon under a louring sky outside Debenhams, so nothing to help there.
Eventually I danced like a marketing person’s best gimp and chose the aspirational product, it assured me clearly and I hope honestly, that it would ‘make me and my family look and feel great‘, that really spoke to me, what more could anyone want from their mixed colour-fast load? I can’t wait for the drying and ironing to be over and done with, so I can at last look and feel great as promised. If something goes wrong and I find I am still a shuffling monkey-gargoyle when I wear these newly washed clothes, I am definitely not going to feel great either and I will send the manufacturers a photo of myself and demand an explanation.
I hadn’t realised how much torture lay in wait before I could start to even think about sending snap-shots of complaint.
If the standard unit of measurement for a mass of ironing is the pile, and three piles are equal to a heap, then a couple of hours ago I was facing what I would estimate to be two heaps and a pile of ironing. However, when ironed it doesn’t cease immediately to be ironing, that would be too simple, no, that only happens after it has been put away in drawers and wardrobes and it then reverts to it’s constituent parts which are collectively known as a ‘wardrobe’ and never a ‘drawer‘. When the day arrives, and all too soon, that a huge bundle has been worn or used, it amalgamates again to become washing. This rainbow congregation of mixed fibres will remain as washing, even after it has been washed, until it’s moisture content is reduced to a predetermined level when it instantly transforms back into ironing. And the whole sickening process starts again.
Mrs Stimp is on holiday with some of her friends somewhere hot, it happens once or twice a year and usually her mother comes to stay and enjoy a week with her grandchildren, but shingles have intervened, which leaves me with dire domestic responsibilities, and all this laundry. So noticeable it can’t be ignored as I’m working at home this week, mainly to prevent the younger Stimps from either running away, not running away and acting responsibly or worse, finding an inadequate selection of apparel from which to assemble the next hour’s ensemble. Working from home is neither a complete pleasure nor is it total purgatory but I do find it incredible why anyone ever chooses to do it permanently, it constantly see-saws between too many and too few distractions.
As I finished ironing the last shirt, sock, chemise, curtain, ceremonial robe or whatever - after the first thirty minutes it had all become a mesmerising steamy blur - I experienced with dazed euphoric relief one of Abraham Maslow’s famous peak experiences. It was an almost mystic enlightenment of a higher truth, but I had inhaled a large quantity of fabric conditioner fumes; Comfort’s Strawberry and Lilly Kiss is definitely one to think twice about if you’re ever offered some outside a school gate.
Doubtless you know the Maslow theory diagrammatically starts with a wide base without which you are not even alive, gradually ascending and narrowing through ever more desirable qualities and achievements until you arrive at the zenith of realising your full potential. An ordinary launderer may well reach the top of his own pyramid, his Hierarchy of Needs fulfilled, but with one hiccup you’re slammed back to level three, or are you? If you have reached such a level of externalisation and self-actualisation then what can displace you from the heady heights of Maslow’s moral high ground? But then how can your pyramid hope to stay up with a couple of blocks missing?
It seems too obviously reliant on a self-regarding motivational neediness, and ignores any fairly normal altruistic compassion. Arthur Koestler’s Holarchy, a construct of his Holons, differs little in it’s dependence on those basic lower levels providing a wholeness to upper echelons, but not so dependant as some management training consultants fatly relying on a hijacked version of both concepts scribbled, spread-eagled and ‘consciously raised’ aloft on flip-charts for a focussed two-hour babble of last straw-clutching.
While I was hotly flattening away I was thinking about these two chaps and how they may have thought their clothes came naturally flat and smooth, that is if they ever spared a minute to consider anything other than big thoughts, hugely big thoughts. I believe Art had a recorded promiscuous proclivity of priapic proportions but I don’t remember reading much about any other pressing. I don’t know if you’re familiar with ironing at all, but there is a button that when pushed gives an exciting and desirably directable extra jet of steam, I used this facility frequently as it was there, so much so that I had a recurring vision, interspersed with the two old cogitators above, of the prison steam-burning scene from the 1949 classic noir and white film White Heat, and Cody Jarrett’s very much made it ma, top of the world ultimate of peak, but shortish, experiences.
Abe firstly found his paragons, none resembling Cagney’s Jarrett, and then backtracked to see why they were paragons, completely overlooking the fact that none of them ever had to struggle with two heaps and a pile of ironing and cook dinners that horrified the faces of two teenagers. What exactly is so menacing and baleful about chicken casserole? Particularly one which I had laboured on for what seemed well over forty minutes, assiduously excluding from the recipe everything I knew they disliked, which was actually quite a lot, only to have it described as, “like a kind of old fashioned skanky gruel”. This seemed a little critical but thankfully in the final analysis it wasn’t thought to suck, which though unfortunately physically possible, used in their parlance would have been too deeply hurtful.
I suppose you could just go Taoist from the start and forget slavishly building your pyramid altogether, but then I’m seeing it all from the twisted perspective of a still warm ironing-board. Traumatised so deeply that I had overlooked until less than twenty creases from the end that there is a Samaritanistic local ironing service. They would have understood, they would at least have listened.
Small moments of rapture, similar to that when I could finally relax my claw-like grip on Rowenta‘s pale smooth neck, are not a modern phenomenon at all, there is some evidence that they occurred several years ago. It comes from the journals of the prolific diarist Sir Thomas Houghton. This, from an entry dated 14th May 1757.
Have suffered a furrowed and bitter mien no better than a churlish Huguenot, from the shame of being violently ejaculated from Covent Garden prematurely last evening and was melancholically musidorous on the state of life in this our island today. What is the world becoming when Englishmen cannot for 3s ameliorate their weary constitutions in the most natural of ways, strangled eel pie, bruised turnips and a Stratford strumpet, and withal finally exagitating several sniffling personators of the stage. My custom for long has been with roisterous vociferation, to exhort and hurl pickles at many a blanched and fop-straddled player during performances of Hamlet and divers tediously vexatious plays. They do I believe enjoy such attention as do all the wretchedly famed.
With a mighty victory for the common man, was able most adroit and secretive to pursue malmsey-streaked pock quiffling Mr. Garrick along Drury lane this fore-noon and land a tremendous kick arseways on him before bolting for an ally and avoiding exposure. Was left gastrickly, nay garrickly! contorted by mirth, pride and an excess of vengeful superbia on reaching home and Doctor Franklyn was summoned forthwith to bleed me.
The unforgiving punster Sir Thomas Houghton, man of several letters and proto-picklelout.
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3 comments:
Where is there anything here.Theres nothing.
Dan, that comment reads like a forlorn cry of someone promised so much from what proves to be a wilderness, but you’re right it didn’t live up to even it’s unpromising start did it? Next time will be so different, I’m itching to get onto some proper posts with pictures of combination planes and maybe blurts of opinion about each one; like you, I literally can’t wait.
While we are expectantly waiting Dan, can I ask if you’ve ever been shackled, as Anon so aptly puts it, to an iron or similar domestic appliance? I felt I was last week, and almost immediately began to develop signs of Stockholm Syndrome and I found myself talking to the iron in an appeasing and almost apologetic way. Anyway, it’s all over now thank goodness and she’s safely shut away where she can’t do any more harm.
It’s a simple pleasure, accidentally concomitant but nonetheless still a pleasure Anon, to see how you managed to gouge two eponyms into one comment and both from a Nicholas of sorts, Rowe and Chauvin. I suppose that’s pretty inconsequential unless you have known and despised a Nicholas that was gender-specifically patronising, a womanizer and a domestic refusenik, then it has a neatly symmetrical roundness that is perfect. Do things like that make you happy too, make it all seem worthwhile?
No, this won’t make you happy either but I briefly knew a girl called Nicola who possessed some perfectly round symmetry. On a less uplifting note, and for you Anon it really isn‘t, she left me with a sigh of relief and a resigned smile, for a rippling-legged geography teacher and that was long before we ever got as far as looking at each other, then at some crumpled clothes and back again to each other. Questioning, expectancy, anticipation, hope, betrayal, conjecture, diffidence, confusion, fear and excitement; the many and conflicting looks of laundry-laden lovers.
I took a quick straw poll in the office a few minutes ago, and the overwhelming view here is that the use of ‘retard’ is less acceptable than moron or imbecile, and cretin emerged as the clear favourite, but I wish Barry wouldn’t insist on giving it the original French pronunciation. I didn’t of course tell them in what connection I wanted to know the suitability of ‘retard‘ but they’re aware that I’m sitting here writing a summary of the June downtime of our US servers, so they didn’t think to even question it. A sad commentary on the boorish crassness of much of today’s correspondence Anonymous, wouldn‘t you say?
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