‘Please do NOT wash up!’ reads the makeshift sign I have fixed above the kitchen sink. It instructs our B&B guests to leave their dirty dishes on the side, which sounds ridiculous. But we cannot convince anyone to put their plates and cutlery in the dishwasher any more, because they all seem to have bought into the latest conspiracy theory.
You may think anti-vaxers like me are annoying enough. But please give me credit for never being so barmy as to become an anti-dishwasherer.
The anti-dishwasherers are way worse than the anti-vaxers for a whole host of reasons. So far they seem to be flying under the radar of the authorities, and no one in a position of power has taken them on to expose their nonsensical rhetoric.
The idea is that dishwashers are behind the current rise in neurological disorders. This is so ludicrous that I am starting to have rows with the guests who come to stay with us and who refuse to put their dishes in the dishwasher for health reasons.
We also routinely catch people rinsing the clean plates they take out of our cupboards. They rinse and rinse sparkling knives and forks under the tap before they use them.
We explain that our house is on spring water from the mountain, and that if you run the kitchen hot tap long enough it will drain down the tanked hot water for the showers, and possibly empty the well entirely in a dry period – which admittedly doesn’t happen very often in West Cork.
But still they run the tap for minutes on end while they rinse items before use; then after eating they run it for minutes again over single plates and forks, while squeezing Fairy Liquid onto each item in turn so as to avoid the allegedly murderous Zanussi.
Leaving aside the waste of water and the draining down of the cylinder – and by people who delight in telling us how worried they are about the environment – nothing makes me angrier than the squeezing of Fairy Liquid onto single items. I used come to blows with the builder boyfriend about it, to the point where it was the number one issue threatening to break our relationship apart until he kicked the habit.
The last bottle of Fairy I bought was so big it would have lasted me a year, but it disappeared in a few days as a young German couple squeezed it over every fork, spoon and plate, while running the hot tap. ‘I can’t stand it!’ I yelled, when I found the nearly empty bottle. And I wrote out the notice, effectively taking the sink out of commission. To this the guests reacted with a mixture of confusion and fury. In fact, I’ve noticed a direct correlation between the amount of concern expressed about the environment by a guest and the extent of their use of resources. The more vociferous the unsolicited lecture a guest gives us about climate change, the more of everything they will consume. The more horrified they are to discover we’re on oil, the more oil they will burn by running the kitchen hot tap, showering for hours or demanding we put the heating on for them in June.
This summer we’ve hosted dozens of young French and Germans, as well as Swedes, Dutch and Canadians, and the twenty-to thirtysomethings are all the same. They’re unable to make any connection whatsoever between their desire to just stop oil and their use of oil, and electricity and gas and petrol and aviation fuel.
One time, the BB claimed he could hear a young Austrian couple sitting in their room chatting for half an hour as the shower ran with no one in it.
Sadly, I can’t do anything about guests wanting to watch a film about the environment on their iPad whilst running the hot shower. But I can get the darn bottle of Fairy out of their hands.
‘So you DON’T want us to wash up?’ demanded a French chap as he surveyed the sign. ‘No, thank you all the same,’ said the BB. ‘We just want you to leave your dishes there so we can load them into the dishwasher.’ The Frenchman looked at him as though we were proposing to place the dishes in a nuclear reactor.
It was the New Zealand lady who argued with us about everything who first came right out with it and told us, ‘Dishwashers cause neurological damage.’ ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. But she was adamant. Her previously fit and healthy fiftysomething brother had just been diagnosed with a horrible disorder and she was convinced that dishwashers were to blame.
It’s all based on a ‘proven’ myth that dishwasher detergent pods are encased in a film which contains microplastics that somehow stick around on the dishes… The theory runs out at this point. It’s garbage. It confuses soluble, biodegradable detergent-grade PVA with insoluble forms used in applications like textiles.
I have a theory, and you can call it a conspiracy theory if you like. The deep state – whatever that is – is feeding these bizarre conspiracies to the masses to divert attention from the real horrors they don’t want us to think about, and stuff they’d rather we didn’t look into properly.
From killer dishwashers to ironing boards that give you cancer, the crackpot theories multiply, and they’re all designed to take the eye off something, is my wild conspiracy theory. The other day, I noticed that some people calling themselves scientists were claiming the Earth was revolving a second quicker one day per year, changing people’s circadian rhythms, leading to ‘spikes in heart attacks, strokes and traffic accidents’. Does that make you want to say, ‘Oh, that explains it!’?
If you’re falling for a lunatic idea, I sympathise – but only up to a point. If you want to run my hot water tap while squeezing a Fairy bottle, then you’ve gone too far.
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