rago nama
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 15/Sep/2010 14:42, 34 days ago
I have a quite appalling long term memory. I think I read somewhere once that cleverer people remember events from earlier in their lives. This makes me almost the antithesis of clever; I can just about remember last Thursday, but only because it was the glorious end of taking malaria pills and I could drink again.But one of the things that I do remember is that, when we went camping as kids, my dad seemed to really enjoy all of the little manual tasks that go with it. Like fetching water and changing the gas and hooking the lights up to the car battery. Nigeria isn’t very similar to most campsites in the north of Wales, but I’m quite similar to my dad. I like having a clear role: a set of Things that need Doing.In the UK, this is largely restricted to enjoying washing up. It’s a meditative process of ritual cleansing; a calming routine; some peaceful time with Radio 4 because no one comes near you when you’re washing up in case they feel they should help. Often, though, in the UK, I’ll leave dirty things lying around for days on end. Nothing really, desperatelyneeds to be cleaned. I can decided to do it today, or tomorrow, or tomorrow. And so the washing-up creeps to the last syllable of recorded chinaware. We had duplicates of most kitchen items and a table that could – with some gently creaking complaints – take the weight of almost every pieceof encrusted crockery. Excess of choice enervates me; it’s like standing in front of the orange squashes in the supermarket and wanting to weep with bewildered apathy.So here - where if washing up isn’t done there actually isn’t a surface in the kitchen, and if it isn’t done within a couple of hours there’re mainly flies, cockroaches, and the odd extraordinary beetle where you’re sure you remembered there used to be a room - there isn’t much of a choice. Everything is more of an immediate imperative. So: you wash up; sweep the floor; mop the floor; boil the water; bottle the filtered water; rinse, wring, and hang out the clothes; collect the matches, candles and torches. Most days you buy and cook more food, because there’ll be a power cut and food from yesterday won’t keep. And then you have the risky space in time where choices are made; but there’s no risk because you’ve already achieved something: already proved that you’re functional.(Obviously it’s more complicated than this: all this kind of work is still a bit of a game and there are still days when I just want to read Milton and drink a G&T like a proper colonial gentlemen.)I kind of drift towards thinking that this is a very male thing. Partly because it links (in a way that’s tedious to anyone but me) to the way I find masculinity defined in Anglo-Saxon writing: but also partly because it seems to be what people suddenly started doing when men threw off the millennia of female domination that preceded our recorded history (not the doing of things. That happened before. But defining ourselves by doing things.). That’s what made it recorded history, I suppose.But that’s all by-the-by. The biggest question for me is: is it remotely possible to have this kind of life in the UK? I don’t think I’d dream, for instance, of having a dishwasher – at least not until I’ve got children which provides a whole different kind of list of things that need doing andwon’t wait. But could I – would I – live without a washing machine? It’s a lot of fun, hand-washing clothes (as it is washing dishes), and it’s a fine sense of achievement. Sure, my clothes probably aren’t as clean – but it’s a long time since anyone sniffed my trousers and I’mblokily happy to be the only one who knows that I’m grimy.But I guess that it just wouldn’t be socially acceptable to say ‘don’t come round tonight; I’m washing my pants’. And we’ve managed to create so many ways to do so many things that we now have to work increasingly hard at creating new Things that need Doing. So if I spent my time and energy doing these nice, basic,life-affirming little tasks, I’d have no time to keep up with all those new, increasingly complicated, Things, and by the time I make it to 40 I won’t even know what they are anymore. It’s not really a choice at all, I don’t think: which is pretty comforting. And it means you can all sniffme to your heart’s content, which is probably a great relief.