Pet Hates – Clean Houses. The clean, mean elite hate my shabby chic décor.
‘People are saying your house in Dorset is DIRTY,’ The Oldie’s Town Mouse told me with compassionate joy. ‘Sophia told me.’
He’s helpful like that is Tom Hodgkinson, ever on the lookout for an opportunity to indulge in mischief. Sophia has never been to my house – but her pristine chums, Jemima and Louisa, have.
Being criticised by the grandes dames of Notting Hill is something of a badge of honour but, given I have a cleaner, what was the origin of these accusations?
My fridge must shoulder some of the blame. I have no truck with sell-by dates. I subscribe to the smell-test theory, whereas the contents of the mighty double-doored American fridges of W11 are daily scanned by Filipino slaves for any proximity to their day of destruction.This must be why their dinner-party food tastes of packaging. It has never been allowed to gain flavour through over-exposure to oxygen.
I inherited a low bar of fridge hygiene from my mother, who never threw away anything. The besieged inhabitants of Paris in 1870 or Leningrad from 1941 could have learned a few tricks from her. In 1979, my brother and I made a clean sweep of the entire kitchen and realised we were throwing away kitchen history.
There were tins of 1969 Sainsbury’s soup and Mac Fisheries pilchards from 1971. Food archaeologists would not just have had a field day; they could have opened an entire Field Studies Centre with the exhibits. The real horror story was the fridge. A frogman’s suit would have been insufficient armoury for the opening of the fridge door.
On the rare occasions when my mother’s sister came by, we took great delight in watching her snap open the fridge for some milk. She would recoil, clutching her illuminated face, with a horror unmatched by Janet Leigh when Norman Bates offered to scrub her back.
Dismembered bodies would have been light relief compared with the furry cheeses and mould-engulfed takeaways.
The fridge door was the engine room of the smell, holding four or five bottles of milk, which contained a transparent greyish liquid up to the nape and had a cottage-cheese culture bursting through the top. So old were some of these bottles that they were in the advanced stages of their own parallel evolutionary process.
Had we never disturbed them, we might have witnessed a new form of life, with its own laws and literature. As it was, none of us dared to throw the bottles away.
‘Don’t touch them. I am going to make scones,’ my mother would say.
I remember Jemima complaining of spiders, but I think that was largely a catch-all condemnation of my entire home in Dorset, with its occasional peeling wallpaper and paint, chipped mugs and old magazines.
The homes of my childhood were knee-deep in spiders and the flitting movements of daddy-long-legs. Everyone’s curtains were faded, and huge cauldrons of bones boiled away on Agas for an eternity. Yet I never saw any soup actually being made. Mouse droppings were a familiar sight in larders until the rats took up occupancy.
But, Louisa, we all not only survived but rarely caught colds – not only because draughts pierced us nightly but because our immune systems could withstand anthrax. The rich live in IKEA sterility: everything is brand-new and they absolutely adore tech – especially massive TVs, which they mount above their fireplaces. One plutocrat once bet me I couldn’t find the speakers whence his muzak blasted. I gave up.
‘They’re in the ceiling!’ he bellowed and pointed to a spotless white roof, above which he must have installed all sorts of cabling at considerable expense.
In rich, spotless houses, there are always far too many family photos on every possible surface, which act as boasting devices. Super-white teeth gurn atop ski suits in St Moritz or bikinis in Mustique. None is ever sepia or unframed. And they love carpets – never Indian rugs – almost daring you to spill your cup of tea, for which there are umpteen coasters. All my side tables are adorned with white rings. Even their art is chosen by interior designers to match their greige walls. My walls are filled with finds – mainly stained prints – from cheap auction houses. They are decidedly dirty and I love them for it.
Barbara took violent umbrage at the wooden floor in my kitchen. ‘James, you can’t live like this,’ she wailed. So I did as I was told and painted the floor in RAF blue, and now it shows every nutshell, cake crumb and harmless splash of gravy. I have to sweep it constantly when I would far rather be making stock.
My solace? I pray Nicky Haslam dubs cleanliness as ‘common’ on next year’s tea towel.
