Jingle jangle, jingle, jangle. Am I being haunted by the ghost of Jimmy
Saville? No, then perhaps Father
Christmas and Rudolf are making a late stop off to get some winter sun. No, well then obviously I have a herd of
cattle grazing in my garden. Bingo! The grass needs cutting anway, so I can
happily go back to sleep. Bzzzzzzzzzz,
bgrzzzzzzzzzzzz. Hmm, am I being
attacked by a swarm of killer bees? No,
the hive is definitely attached to my neighbour’s house and not mine and that
itching is undoubtedly mosquito bites.
It must be my neighbour starting some early morning welding. Hoooowwwwwww, haaaaooooooooooooow. So it seems packs of dogs really do howl at
a full moon? I can definitely go back to
sleep for another hour if the moon’s still out.
Of course just as I’m drifting off, the village loudspeaker system will
kick in with its morning ritual of news and song. If only the sound wasn’t so distorted, it
might be quite informative. I can
understand the early wake-up as bed time in Lao is similarly early, so I find
it’s best to just give up, get up, kick off the ‘Hello Kitty’ bed sheets which
have inexplicably formed themselves into a ball around me once again, have a
cold shower and some hot tea and start the day again.
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| Hungry cows - in my ruddy garden! |
The cold shower isn’t a choice, although now the
temperatures are on the up again, it’s starting to become quite welcome. Why a house needs 200 television channels but
no hot water system is a slight mystery to me but as long as I get the timing
right, the water pressure is good enough to blast off the worst of the grime
and dust.
My house is unrelentingly dusty, so any kind of shower is a
welcome relief. It will probably come as
a surprise to know that I spend a significant proportion of my weekends
cleaning but I really do. Laundry is all
done by hand in two buckets, with some fearsome washing powder and stain removing
soap. All in all, with soaking time
included, one load takes me around 2 hours.
If I clean the ‘Hello Kitty’ bedsheets (they came with the house), another load of washing will take me another
couple of hours. Boiling water for the
washing up takes around 15 minutes; a trip to the market takes around an hour
and a half and I could spend all sodding day sweeping the floors and still be
left with dusty floors at the end of it.
So, in a normal week, if I devote a day at the weekend to getting the
housework done, then things are pretty much sanitary for the following few
days.
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| My mess making nemeses |
I’ve decided to blame the chickens for the dust. They’re not my chickens, just as the hungry
cows aren’t mine either. They belong to
some unspecified neighbour but wander around foraging as they
please. The little minxes have decided
that it’s great fun to move the soil from the beds at the side of the house
onto the concrete path, where it can easily be stirred up by the merest breeze
and from thence be re-distributed over the house, the veranda, my
motorbike and of course any drying laundry.
I hate those bloody chickens and I don’t even know what they’re looking
for. The other side of the house would
be much more lucrative in terms of food sources, so I can only conclude that
they’re trying to piss me off. Either
that or they’re attention seeking because there’s no doubt I’ll be having a
little word with them about their antisocial behaviour. I don’t think their chicken brains can
interpret the stream of invective I direct their way, so they probably think
I’m being friendly.
Because of the chickens, my clothes and pyjamas are always filthy with
end-of-the-day dirt, particularly around the lower back. When I say lower back, I mean lower back and
not arse. I can’t work out why but perhaps it's because the sweat streams down my back, collecting dirt as it goes, to form a pool of sludge at my waistband. So my sheets get grubby quite quickly, mostly
from my dusty feet but the grimy pyjamas don’t help.
My mother always denies it but as children she used to
get us to clean the worst of the garden dirt off our feet by flushing them in
the toilet, so we didn’t tramp filth round the house and into the bath. I think it’s quite a nifty idea, so I’ve
extrapolated to use my in-built bathroom arse-hose to clean not only my feet
but the bathroom tiles and to give the laundry a final jet wash. The arse-hose is like a hand-held bidet and
no-one can persuade me that it’s useful for its intended purpose but I hate to
see a gadget go to waste.
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| Hanging the washing - at least it dries quickly! |
So you can see, I really put in my best effort to trying to
keep the house clean but it’s inevitably a compromise between cleanliness and
time efficiency. In the warmer months,
it’s also necessary to make sure the house is open, to moderate the temperature
and by its design, there are vents and gaps in most places. In particular, there are vents in the
bathroom which coupled with the fact that the shed is just the other side of
the wall, means that insects and bugs like to come in to the toilet area to
die. This really gives the wrong
impression and no amount of arse-hose to foot spa conversion will mend those
hygiene bridges! I should also admit,
part of my desire to keep the place clean is just because I don’t want the
chickens to think that they’ve won.
An added bonus with
all this vigorous cleaning is that at least one night a week I can go to bed at
about 9pm really tired, albeit in what is essentially the same dust bed a hamster
might enjoy sleeping in. At least it helps me ignore the next morning’s
cacophony of cows, welding, dogs and loudspeakers.
