The Washing Machine Man Cometh
And he couldn’t find ANYTHING WRONG. The beastly machine behaved PERFECTLY while he was there. Do you know what washing-machine call-outs COST? Besides the fact that hanging around waiting for an elderly*, semi-green** washing machine to FUNCTION or, of course, not function, takes forever, which may have some influence on call-out cost, but it means you’re standing there wasting time and money.***
Siiiiiigh. So he went away again saying in a kind and gentle voice suitable for addressing the goggle-eyed and franticly disbelieving, to use the wretched thing a few times and if it breaks down again he’ll come out again and remonstrate. So even now, here, as we speak, or anyway as I write, at the mews’ kitchen table, the washing machine at the cottage is busy churning away on the first load of a week’s backlog of laundry. Or, perhaps, not.
And I haven’t got round to telling you about my computer(s) deciding not to send all my emails. Just some of them. Or that my organic box scheme†† has run out of the no-cal corn thins that I eat when I have to eat something but can’t afford to eat any, you know, food. I will go mad without my corn thins. Or that the soles fell off one of my pairs of All Stars. I think they’re even beyond duct tape. I think I’m going to have to throw them out. Or that we’ve had Alarming Encounters with off-lead dogs two days in a row after a (comparative) lull. Yesterday’s is still giving me flashbacks of looking eyeball to eyeball with something with fangs as long as my fingers. ‘Oh, he won’t hurt you, he’s a gentle giant,’ said his useless owner, laughing nervously. In that case why is he holding his head in that weird way (possibly he is lowering it the better to look me straight in the eye) and growling? I found it rather suggestive that the hellhounds for once were not straining at their harnesses to go play with the Tyrann–I mean the gentle giant, but showed some tendency to hide behind me. There isn’t room for two hellhounds to hide behind me.
Or that the copyedited PEGASUS is due home again in six days. Or that PEG II is driving me . . .
The washing machine had better be washing.
* * *
* This is the first time he’s been to the cottage and not only is it a very small kitchen but it’s full of hellhounds. And hellhound crate. So I thought the look of bemusement he initially bent on his patient had to do with, you know, circumstances. But after a moment he said, Is this a very old machine?
Beats the heck out of me. It was already somebody else’s cast-off when we put it in the second kitchen [sic] at the old house for visitor use. I just brought it along when we left. I was going to need a washing machine, and our buyers were about to start the marble-Jacuzzi-with-gold-taps transformation and they certainly weren’t going to want it.
Washing-machine man is a stalwart specimen of British Reserve but I definitely saw him smile when I said that while the machine and I were not the best of friends I’d rather keep it than try to change it since I have no idea how I’d get it out the door now with the dog gate screwed into the wall. Or its replacement in. Even in the absence of any large appliances, gaining entrance to the cottage is something of an obstacle course. I not infrequently manage to jam the bottom half of the stable door into the leading edge of the dog gate at which point they do a dovetail-join thing and will not come apart again. In the process of trying to trick them into separating I can be relied on to crack my head against the top half of the stable door, which will have rebounded against the bunker-sized mound of (muddy) coats hanging opposite. And if you struggle over the threshold despite all these impediments you will promptly fall over the forty-two pairs of (muddy) All Stars. And some hellhounds.
I do this several times a day. I have the scars to prove it. I do try not to use too much language in deference to the neighbours. But I find that there’s an additional frisson to the process at mmmph o’clock in the morning. No matter how many times we get home at this hour and no matter how gallantly hellhounds are defending my back while I wrestle with keys, doors, curtains—I forgot to tell you about the curtain—gates and attendant paraphernalia, there is something out there at mmmph o’clock and we need to get indoors before it arrives. This sense reaches its crescendo just as we do get indoors and I whirl around to slam the door in its face. I’ve never yet heard it carom off the outside of the door but I still shut the door pretty smartly. When the curtain doesn’t get in the way. Or the gate. Or some shoes.
** Speaking of green. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1953692,00.html
I was reading this this afternoon, waiting for the thrice-damned washing machine to do something. I’m a relatively unapologetic meat-eater: in the first place, due to some malfunction or other, my metabolism shuts down if it doesn’t get meat, red meat, pretty frequently. This was true even before the ME; it’s now just a lot more critical and immediate. In the second place, humans are built to be omnivores, and—perhaps this is third place—I have an automatic distrust of extreme salvation, and global vegetarianism is my idea of extreme. Fourth place would be that what this article is saying makes sense and, oh, fifth place, Peter and I eat grass-fed organic critters.
But I’d be glad if this theory gained some headway. The main drawback I see is the cost of the finished product: it’s true, Peter and I can afford to eat grass-fed organic. But local farmers’ markets and box schemes and things can be astonishingly cheap; I would have said that the biggest problem to shifting over to more sustainable foodways is wrenching your mindset in the right direction, and bracing yourself for the extra faffing around that raw stuff requires. There are advantages to modest little cases of ME like mine—I am not talking about the crippling kind of ME or any other ailment or disability—I don’t eat fast food or super-processed whatever because it makes me sick, and I can almost pretend to be a normal person if I stick to the pure and holy. It helps that I like to cook and have a cooperative husband.
*** While we were hanging around I showed him my melted vacuum cleaner which I still haven’t done anything about, like, write to the catalogue company I bought it from so they can say, oh, really? [yawn]. And he said he had a colleague who specialised in vacuum cleaners and he’ll ask him if it’s worth fixing.
I have this gripping mental image of Appliance Person Conventions where they meet and attend seminars on semi-tubular and Pineapple friction-lock rivets and non-volatile memory chips in self-mobilising hellhound-hair control units, and exchange phone numbers so as to be in a position to impress the glurp out of device-and-gizmo-challenged clients at such moments as clients are most vulnerable to such impressing.
†† Speaking of organic box schemes
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