OH, the ruminative pleasure of doing the dishes! I’ll be quite candid with you here and say that, some years ago, when I went to stay with my well-off pals at their big hoose, Swanky Towers, my head was turned.
By a dishwasher. I would pull up a chair in front of it and just listen to the dishes being sprayed with water and soap, and I would know that all was right with the world. What a marvellous machine! I don’t know what it does once you shut the door on the dishes but you put them in dirty and they come out clean. Amazing!
Of course, it was its function as a labour-saving device that appealed. There’s nothing more dispiriting than a pile of dirty dishes that you’ve forgotten to wash, and that you discover just before going to bed, so that next morning, as you stagger into the kitchen, it’s the first thing that confronts you. It suggests that you are dissolute and lacking moral fibre.
While staying with my friends, I was looking for a home of my own and was now specific about my requirements: I wanted a big dishwasher with a little house attached. Looking back, I can’t believe that I pooh-poohed properties that lacked such a machine or certainly a space in which to install one.
Now I am living, for the moment, in a tiny little flat and having to do the dishes by hand again and – d’you know what? – it hasn’t been too bad. I put the radio on and listen to amusing and informative programmes.
I even have thoughts. Yes – them! I haven’t really thought about anything for years now, just blundering through life on auto-pilot. But now, in this 10 or 15-minute hiatus, I find my mind waking up, sometimes sorting out knotty problems, sometimes hatching ideas for best-selling novels that will make me independently wealthy.
The question is: when I am independently wealthy, will I once more invest in a dishwasher for my large tower-house by the banks of the Tay or the Bahamas (another matter about which I remain undecided)? I suspect I would. I cannot see the spec for a swanky house saying: “Please note that this sumptuous property, while perfect in all other respects, does not come with a dishwasher.”
In other words, there will probably be one with the house. Well, I guess it would be fine to have the option. But I know fine well that, given the choice, I’ll just bung the dishes in the washer. I am just a man. I am not a saint.
In the meantime, I revel in being up to my elbows in suds. I marvel that, search as much as you will before pulling the plug, there is always a teaspoon that has eluded washing. I enjoy the technical challenge of stacking bowls, pots and plates so that they do not topple over onto the floor, as they did during my first few amateurish efforts.
But I will not enjoy the mornings when I have forgotten to do them the night before and when, if I’m to enjoy hygienically my breakfast of Honey Puff Doodahs With Wee Bits of Dried Berry, I have to rinse out a bowl and spoon individually under the cold tap. Perish the thought!
