Prologue: My life in housework

Summary

This book is about housework as science: bacteria, germs, dirt, tools, machines, water, coal, gas, electricity and architecture are among its main characters. So are the people, mostly women, who had the vision needed to understand the importance of household science in making the world a healthier place. To this end, they engaged in huge amounts of scientific and educational work, much of which has been eclipsed from our cultural memory, and some of which appears in the following chapters of this book. But housework is a matter of personal experience as well as of scientific analysis and public policy. The observations that follow originally formed an Appendix to The Science of Housework, but I came to see that they were misplaced, that I had succumbed to the academic convention which hides from view the origins of our intellectual engagement with the world.

I began this morning by watching a YouTube video about how to mend a dishwasher. One of the machine's little red lights was flashing. I had no idea why: the light said the machine needed more salt to be added, but I’d done that, and still the light blinked fiercely at me. This whole episode is a huge inconvenience to me, a pensioner (which is not how I think of myself) living on her own with no one else to blame, most of the time, for the burnt porridge saucepans and the congealed remains of odd delicious meals.

I’ve never liked washing up. I do it so badly that my family refuse to let me do it in their houses. Often I don't put my glasses on, so much of the detritus just has a swim and is still there afterwards. I read somewhere the useful piece of advice that housework is easier if you can't see the dust and the bits of rubbish which this book is so excruciatingly about; thus, leave your glasses off when you do it. None of those wise matrons whose sensible scientific tracts feature in this book would have approved of me. This morning I have to take all the dirty dishes out of the dishwasher and subject them to my version of hand- cleaning. The water is barely hot, and I am cross.