HINTS ON HOUSEWORK AND FOLLOWERS

EizabethM tagged me for household hints the other day. Little does she know! Housework is not my favourite activity. So, the best advice I can give is to do as little as possible. Dirt does not in modest amounts injure dignity. Provided things are relatively clean and relatively tidy there is no law that says you have to clean daily. The odd cobweb or dust thread will not bring the heavens crashing about you. It is not necessary to scrub everything with Dettol; we are provided with immune systems that cope with bacteria - or ‘germs’ - in an efficient and business like way without expensive chemical help.

I suppose I was born a Piglet who, if you remember, liked to roll in the mud, and was most disconcerted at being kidnapped by Kanga and carried home to be scrubbed in the bath. I feel like that in houses that are ultra-clean, the paint gleaming and not so much as a thread out of place. I cannot feel comfortable.

I far prefer those cluttered bohemian houses that instantly feel welcoming and where you are as likely to find something of interest (animals, books, children’s toys, a chocolate biscuit) under the furniture as on top of it.

So what would I insist on in a house? First a large kitchen in which everyone can congregate and with sufficient surfaces for people to deposit their belongings and bags and newspapers and ornaments and wine bottles and still have enough space for cooking and eating. And of course a dishwasher, for being lazy I dislike washing up.

Secondly I am a big, big fan of round tables, rather than square ones. It is amazing just how many people you can seat at a round table and how the round table helps conversation and interaction. And I am a great fan of oil cloth as well, the sort of bright, happy designs that you can find in a French supermarket or hardware store.

Unless you have a dog bent on a personal mission to bring indoors the contents of the garden, then removing one’s outdoor shoes at the door and replacing them with slippers or house shoes really does make a difference. Some people drearily insist that all visitors do the same, forcing them to wander around in cold stockinged feet. But I don’t mind visitors keeping their shoes on. I don’t really mind them smoking either, come to that. Live and let live.

Books seem to me to make a house interesting and do not necessarily have to reside neatly on bookshelves. Pictures provide colour and I have always had a thing (not everyone’s up of tea this) about antique maps. And lastly flowers make up for any amount of cleaning left undone. So here, I am very much afraid, endeth the lesson.

Ever since Faith wrote about black day dreams and Bodran posted that spooky picture of the little girl’s face I have wanted to write about the real life experience of Younger Daughter.

She was doing voluntary work in Mozambique when she started to have a sort of uncomfortable feeling. Her moods were low and she kept having bad dreams.

Nothing was serious enough to warrant the doctor - she was in a remote area of the country. But she was recommended to see a ‘spirit doctor,’ who took her hands and gazed into her eyes and muttered and incanted. ‘You have acquired ‘a follower’ she said.

The follower was apparently a young girl, recently deceased. ‘A member of the family,’ said the spirit doctor, and now a restless spirit who had attached herself to Younger Daughter in the hope of achieving something. ‘Just tell her, firmly, to go away and stop bothering you.’

Younger daughter confessed to not knowing any recently dead members of the family, old or young. But she followed the instruction and the follower duly departed.

When she got home she recounted this strange tale, whereupon we pointed out that there was in fact a distant cousin, a Roman Catholic, who had had a child which, for some reason, had never been baptised. The child died unexpectedly aged about 10. But when the family came to bury her, the priest had refused her a church burial because she hadn’t been baptised.

Younger Daughter had known nothing of this story. And you can make of my tale what you will. The bad feelings in Mozambique might have been just a touch of malaria, which she contracted. Or the poor un-properly-buried child, who is is such a phantom that even I do not know her name, might now be plaguing some other family member in search of a decent internment. But the spirit doctor’s advice was a simple, if nimby-ish, direction to begone and to plague someone else. And whatever it was, went.