When, at last, your work is done…

Having just spent a good hour and a bit trying to clean my oven and other nefarious parts of our slum-like kitchen I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell I was doing here. In a week I’ll be evacuating from my current domicile, the typical student-filth soaked flat and moving to more consistently hygienic surroundings, namely the middle class nest of my parent’s house. I’m cleaning for a number of reasons, partly in time for my “rents” arrival to conduct the big move, to salvage as much of my deposit from my landlord as I’m constantly reminded of the tea bag stains I’ve made on the walls and ceilings, and lastly through a personal sense of shame that is driving me madder with loathing each and every day I pass in solitude.

I got to thinking with my head in the oven (the gas was off, although it was tempting) how well should I clean this particular white appliance? One of my flatmates has already moved into a new flat shared with his long-term girlfriend and has a great deal of domestic bliss/hell awaiting him, the other has deserted me on a three week tour of Europe, taking in the mixed delights of London, Estonia, and Copenhagen, which leaves just me waiting to descend further into half-insanity and boredom.

Faced with the choice between flat cleaning, if only for better health, and getting on with my CV and covering letters for job applications. I leapt at the chance to clean something, swapping one highly potent boring chore for another. So here I was, in my oven speculating as to how much of it I should clean, and what standard of hygiene I should seek to attain for my efforts, in what felt like a task almost worthy of Sisyphus; forever rolling boulders up the mountain face. Without going into too much graphic detail I knew the oven would take ages to clean “properly” and is epic in scale if you let it get on top of you. The hinges were gunked up with gunk, dust, and disease. The glass of the door had that faint brown trickling grease that seems a particularly nasty form of chip fat rain. The floor of the main oven was thick like the Somme with black and brown crud that I had to remove with a metal spatula like scraping wallpaper but twice as hard and ever so fiddly when done in the dark of a big square box. For a while I felt like this my destined end, I’d found my tomb and now all I had to do was settle in and make the best of it for the next thousand years but I knew the dust mites and other assorted beetles would devour me long before then.

What was hard to decide was what I should clean first, and how hard. Some of the stuff just wouldn’t come off and I could only guess that it was eternal muck sent from Heaven. It wasn’t as if I badly qualified or ill-equipped, I had my trusty sponge, spatula, and Mr. Muscle™ (I was even wearing the official uniform of white vest) but some of it just wouldn’t budge. I also resigned myself to knowing that eventually it would all get dirty again. Inevitably as soon as I tried to cook some Instant Noodles or some other form of virulent anti-food I would lose a few strands over the edge and the blue light of the gas ring would in seconds burn them to a crisp and solidify them like a line in the mountain scape of the hob. Perhaps it was the gas fumes or the intensely hallucinogenic qualities of assorted cleaning fluids but this realisation that we never stop cleaning gave everything I was trying so hard to do a powerful sense of futility, of being beaten when I had only just begun, so young and already drowned in the mixed waves of despair and charred onion slivers. Nothing would ever be clean again.

If you look closely enough nothing is ever as clean as it should be, and it never can be. People are always keen to criticise NHS housekeeping staff (cleaners, to you) for the spread of C.diff and other such “superbugs” without realising that the staff clean everything, and then clean it again, all the time. The pressure put upon the underrated, barely over minimum wage, staff is immense and they only have so many hours in the day to do their job, and two hands to do it with. My point is apart from aseptic pre-packaged syringes, or airtight rooms the possibility of absolute cleanliness really is very much next to Godliness in their shared status of pure mythology, like chastity we can aspire to great heights of overcoming nature, but all too often, being human, people will fall from the horse.

Another strange aspect of this situation is the double life some people lead in their jobs and private lives. It was a always strange for me whilst at sixth form college going out to dinner and being waited upon, my current job at the time being a kind of employment as a kitchen potwashing facilitator, sitting there knowing that behind the ridiculous double saloon type doors there was another young guy or girl just like me having to go through the awful degrading motions of sweeping and wiping away other peoples filth; spittle mixed with sauce, chewed up gristle, bones picked clean by greedy fingers, another Orwell from his Paris years slaving away at someone else’s pleasure. This reversal of the assigned roles struck me as being quite surreal, and served as a distinct reminder that I was working the next day, and before I went to work I would have to wash up my dinner plates at home first. As with the hospital cleaners who spend all day cleaning and bleaching wards suffering cracked whitened hands and breathing in chemical fumes that to the lungs feel something like sulphur, they get to go home, feed their kids and then clean their own home, then get up early next morning and do the whole thing all over again.