Moving day looms, so I have been packing today. All day. Despite having had an ayi in every few months to give the place a thorough clean (which, in China, usually means wiping everything with a damp rag, but not actually dusting or polishing anything in the way we know in the West), and despite attempting to clean up myself (including dusting, and hoovering) every month or so.... well, I find now that there are bits here and there that we've both missed pretty consistently for the last five-and-a-half years. Actually, in Beijing the air is so dusty (and the tap water too, come to that - I'm not convinced that the Chinese approach to cleaning actually makes things any cleaner at all) that the place gets pretty damned filthy within only a few days. After a week or two, you don't notice it getting that much worse. After a month or so, you're tempted to leave it for 3 months, or 6 months before you have a proper clean-up. Yes, things get pretty disgusting, but... a sense of hopelessness takes hold in the face of the relentless griminess of the Beijing environment. There doesn't seem to be anything you can do to hold back the tide, so why bother? I was reminded by my exertions today (and by the coughing, sneezing, and itching which have inevitably attended them) that the great Quentin Crisp once said: "There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse." I can't remember which of his books that's from, and I just spent 20 minutes on the Web searching for it without success. Ah well. I suppose that should really have been my 'Bon mot for the week', but I'd already posted something else. I've never taken to housework, and so this aphorism of Crisp's has a strong appeal for me. But I have a streak of cleanliness and orderliness in me that rebels against the idea. And I've seen friends who've lived like this, never cleaning for months, weeks, years - and the squalor they create is unspeakable. And it does appear to keep getting worse year by year... There are dark corners in my apartment where the dust - more grit and sludge, really - is over a quarter of an inch thick. Ugh! |
Monday, November 16, 2009
Dust
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2 comments:
According to Wikiquote, that's from Chapter 15 of Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant.
The passage that precedes it is just about as entertaining. He talks about someone named Nancy Spain, whose "first law" apparently stated (in QC's words), "only a fool would make the bed every day." Then he admits that he himself does no cleaning:
Except that after a while it became necessary to jump in the air while putting on my trousers so as to avoid trailing them in the dust, I never found that [not cleaning] brought in its filthy wake any disadvantages whatsoever.
A couple sentences later he comes out (ha) with the four-years line, declaring it a "companion law to Miss Spain's."
(Sorry; you know the way my engine kicks over when someone says they've been unable to find something on the Web.)
Aha! I thought I could rely on you, JES. Many thanks.
I haven't cultivated the habit of turning first to Wikiquote. Perhaps I should.
I had this strange, strong (wrong!) conviction that it wasn't The Naked Civil Servant, that I'd read it somewhere else. Ah, but it must be over 20 years since I read that, so hardly surprising that the memory gets a bit fuzzy. Good book, though.
I had no recollection of the bed-making corollary. I think that one may ake more sense.
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