I try to head for cooler climes year-round but particularly during the summer, as anything over 20 degrees has me sweating like a pervert and swearing like a docker. But this year I was persuaded to join friends in Corfu, and so with my younger daughter in tow, I braced myself for the inevitable perimenopausal response to savage heat. 10-year-old Ottilie, of course, loved it instantly. Reflecting, as she basked in the balmy waters of Corfu Old Town, that while she’d loved our holiday in Iceland a few weeks previously, and while she agreed that Norway is a peerless destination, she could now understand why some of her friends like a Mediterranean jaunt. Indeed, a war of attrition for a return visit next summer commenced pretty much immediately.
I had the audacity to compost some butter with a use-by date of November 1997
But as I bemoaned the undoing of years of cold weather grooming, one of our party returned to London to an even less desirable situation. For upon entering his house with his wife and children, he found that his sister-in-law had availed herself of their absence to make some home improvements. These included new curtains, a few judiciously placed throws, rearranged dining room furniture, and the installation of a CCTV doorbell. My friend took the view that it wasn’t so much that the tweaks weren‘t necessary or didn’t look good, but rather that it was a grotesque invasion, and furiously set about dismantling the doorbell while frothing at the mouth with rage.
It got me thinking about the limits of acceptable intrusion from one’s nearest and dearest. Sometimes it’s clear-cut. I took particular umbrage when Pansy, our largely outdoor cat (the product of an incestuous relationship between strays taken in by our cleaner) ventured upstairs when we were away, forced the bedroom door open, and relieved herself in middle of my bed.
Almost equally upsettingly, before they departed for a fortnight in France, a friend instructed her parents in the starkest possible terms that they weren’t to let themselves in and start tending the garden. When my friend got home, after a long drive and with four exhausted and hysterical children in tow, they found that her parents had not only been in the house, but that they’d pulled up all the York stone on the terrace, dug up the flowerbeds, and in a final sweeping flourish, smashed a favourite mug, leaving the shards scattered over the kitchen floor.
Sometimes it’s a grey area. About ten years ago, my mother-in-law savaged me for what seems to this day a fairly minor infraction. She prides herself on her Quentin Crispesque approach to housekeeping, believing it terribly middle class to get bogged down about domestic filth. She lives in London, where a relentless rota of lodgers and grandchildren ensures food doesn’t go to waste. But a full hazmat suit is required when prising open the fridge in her house in Dorset which is only inhabited for a couple of weekends a month. In the early days of my marriage, I risked just this manoeuvre during a visit and had the audacity to compost some butter with a use-by date of November 1997. The fury which rained down on me has stayed with me ever since, and I now simply look past the green potatoes with creeping tendrils and phosphorescent cheese (though I occasionally try to wash the towels that can languish in the bathroom for months).
This postwar mentality of avoiding waste has been studiously inculcated in my husband by his mother. He once exploded at my own mother who’d been babysitting, and having put the girls to bed, used the time to parse the mouldy and fresh fruit; she hasn’t dared jettison anything since – much to my annoyance in fact. Because I’m really quite content for pretty much anyone to spare me from drudgery. In fact, I’d be delighted if someone broke into our house, sorted the fridge, dealt with the laundry, and finished the refurbishment which has now been going on for four years. The key, as far as I’m concerned, is not to add to the grind. As a cat might.
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