Life is much too short to be doing things the old-fashioned way
Are you troubled by scratches on your wooden furniture? Do you lie awake at nights, brooding on how to clean the hard-to-reach corners of your glass vases? If so, fret no longer, for help is at hand. Mary Berry, scourge of the soggy bottom, has turned her attention to the wider domestic realm. Her new book, Mary’s Household Tips and Tricks, is “a practical book on household care and the joys of taking time to do small and essential things in life beautifully and well”.
Having restored the sparkle to your vases by swilling them with a mixture of rice and vinegar, and treated the scars on the table-leg that is Mr Tinkles’s favoured scratching-post by rubbing it with a walnut (the leg, not the cat), it is time to turn your attention to the loo. To remove limescale beautifully and well, Mary suggests extracting a mugful of water from the bowl, spraying the limescale thus exposed with loo cleaner and leaving for 30 minutes before returning the water to the bowl.
If you detect a hint of Mrs Beeton in all this, you are surely not mistaken (though Mrs B’s method for cleaning fiddly glassware involves bits of soapy blotting-paper rather than rice and vinegar).
The difference is that Beeton’s Book of Household Management assumed her readers would command a battery of domestic support – lady’s maid, housemaid, maid of all work, laundrymaid and so on – of which Berry’s readers can only dream.
Launching her book at the Henley Literary Festival, Berry explained that she was influenced by her mother’s post-war frugality; and it was during the post-war years, when the servant classes had found more rewarding occupations, that the burden of domestic drudgery began to weigh most heavily on women. In Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes, the historian Virginia Nicholson quotes a 1951 Mass Observation statistic: that housewives in the London suburbs spent 15 hours a day on domestic activities.
If life is too short to stuff a mushroom, as Shirley Conran insisted in 1975, it is surely too short, 40 years on, to be brewing homemade household cleaner with vinegar, citrus peel and cinnamon sticks.
In truth, I am not convinced that Mary means us to follow her advice literally. A certain nostalgia for the old ways of a simpler world is much in the wind at the moment. Next week the film star and typewriter fancier Tom Hanks launches his debut collection of short stories, each featuring an old-fashioned typewriter. Meanwhile, Gardeners’ World presenter Monty Don urges his viewers to take up their scythes with the rallying-cry, “Trust hand tools and physical labour”.
The political slogan “Take Back Control” has a hollow ring in a world where everything from the international situation to a concert trip or a journey by public transport seems fraught with deadly hazard, and even our mundane choices of food, clothing or entertainment are spied on and parroted back at us in targeted advertisements and suggested playlists.
How, then, to defy the power over every aspect of our lives that this hostile world seems to exert? Michel de Montaigne hoped that death – then as now the great uncontrollable – would find him planting cabbages.
Four centuries later, Mary, a Stoic philosopher for our times, finds the essence of living beautifully and well in banishing limescale from the lavatory bowl.