Today, it seems, is laundry day. The resident washing machine is practically Edwardian and whilst I’ve put most of my clothes through it, I don’t feel it’s to be trusted with one or two items. So I’ve been doing a little washing by hand.
There’s an extendable wire rack in the bathroom which pulls out from the wall. But the moment I touched it the bloody thing flung itself off into the bath. I carefully replaced it, but it’s clearly incapable of bearing the weight of a single sock. It was an hour later before it occurred to me that every visitor to this place has probably had exactly the same experience, but no one has had the balls to point it out to the agents for fear of losing their deposit.
I’m half inclined to take it out the back and set fire to it. The little bugger has left me with a blood blister right under my thumbnail, where it nipped me. And all the clothes are strewn over the backs of chairs and radiators. I feel like I’m a character in some kitchen-sink drama. I should be wearing a headscarf and moaning, in a Northern accent, about my having a bun in the oven and him blowing all the housekeeping on beer.
*
The other thrilling new development is that I’ve become a newspaper-buyer. I forgot to pick one up the day before yesterday and it meant I had to sit in the pub and read a book, rather than do my precious crossword, which irritated me no end. At home we’ve always had them delivered and to be honest I’ve just never quite got round to cancelling them.
One of the articles I read today concerned some report into rocketing dentists’ charges. And how, as a consequence, more people are simply not bothering to go at all. It failed to mention how a fair proportion of the population aren’t particularly keen on going to the dentist in the first place and ready to latch onto any excuse which comes their way. The same report claimed that due to the hike in dentists’ prices we’re increasingly inclined to indulge in a bit of DIY dentistry, citing one character from somewhere like Leicester who’s extracted a dozen or more of his own teeth with a pair of pliers.
Now I think most people would agree that check-ups, at the very least, should be free to everyone, especially those who are short of cash. But it’s equally clear that the fellow to whom they referred is a certifiable nutcase. And that if he hadn’t been pulling out his teeth with a pair of pliers he’d’ve only got up to some other form of self-mutilation, like lopping off his toes with a pair of secateurs.
Anyway, the obsessive buying and/or reading of newspapers has always struck me as a peculiarly male trait. Along with hushing one’s wife in mid-conversation to listen to the news on the radio, as if this was all dreadfully important and the newsreader was addressing them personally.
I’m not entirely sure where it comes from – this rather inflated sense of self-importance regarding current affairs. It’s perfectly admirable, I’m sure, to try and keep abreast of what’s going on, both nationally and internationally. But at the very heart of it there is, I think, a delusion of mammoth proportions, which is that by keeping up with the news one is in control of it, and therefore in control of the whole wide world.
Perhaps it goes back to all that Evelyn Waugh/P. G. Wodehouse gentlemen’s clubs stuff. Perhaps, when men sit in their favourite armchair on a Sunday morning and plough through some impenetrable piece about what’s cooking in the Ukraine or Tanzania, they imagine themselves akin to some cabinet minister.
Whatever it is, it’s clearly in their chromosomes. When the health department of the local council has to break into some semi-derelict house because of the terrible smell and the fear of conflagration, is it ever a woman they find lost among the towers of rotting newspapers? No. Generally speaking, it is not.