Fablongate is back and I need Helen’s help
SORRY, I can’t come out tonight, I’m busy.’
‘What are you doing?’ my friend Helen asked. ‘You haven’t been out in weeks.’ ‘I have stuff I need to do. In the house…’ I added sheepishly. ‘What things?’ she said accusingly. ‘Just stuff,’ I said. ‘You know — sorting things.’
‘Your house is perfect,’ she said. She’s probing. She knows.
‘Finishing touches,’ I said defensively, ‘bits.’
There was a pause as we both pictured me sitting in my weirdly perfect house moving scented candles around while all of my friends enjoyed a friday night get-together at the Village Inn.
Helen broke it with a knowing sigh.‘You’re doing housework again — aren’t you?’
Helen is an author and when I moved to Killala over 10 years ago we became friends. Helen uses housework as a disparaging, cover-all term for everything from necessary every day washing up to unnecessary nonsense like re-arranging curtain tie-backs and polishing sideboards.
When we moved into our last house I went through a period of decorating obsession, staying awake at night wondering where I might source a retro ironing board cover etc. I turned into a terrible bore. My rock bottom came when Helen arrived unexpectedly one morning and ‘caught’ me covering the jar of instant coffee in gingham fablon so that I would better match my vintage country aesthetic.
Glaring at her defiantly I whipped out a Sharpie and proceeded to write ‘Coffee’ on the front of it. She just looked at me and said, ‘Why?’
‘It looks better,’ I mumbled. ‘No it doesn’t,’ she said. ‘Kate. It’s a jar of instant coffee.’ I laughed, she laughed — we wept with laughter and that was the last of the gingham fablon. Until now. My new house is the opposite of the old one. The decor is simple and minimalist. I therefore thought I would be off the hook with my great propensity for excessive compulsive housework. But I’m not. As my dear friend correctly intuited, I can’t stop wiping.
We have been in our new house for eight weeks and I am so infatuated with its clean surfaces that at the sign of the merest speck of anything on the floor, I am out with the dustpan and brush. Glass surfaces and big windows have me experimenting with homemade vinegar cleaning solutions and various types of cloths, techniques and accessories. Helen’s fears for me are entirely founded. I don’t want to go out any more. All I want to do is stay in and ‘wipe’.
I have always considered that I’m not house proud in the sense that I don’t genuinely don’t care about what other people think of me. I have never given a stuff about keeping up appearances in front of the neighbours. I want people to come into my house and feel utterly at home. But when you are a ‘wiper’ that doesn’t happen.
There is an important distinction to be made between people who’ wipe’ out of necessity and general respect for household hygiene, and recreational ‘wipers’. My sister is a fuss pot whose home is thoroughly wiped at all times. However, you never see my sister actually wiping because when she has guests, even if it’s just her mother and sister, they take precedence over work surfaces. A ‘wiper’, on the other hand, will whip out a J cloth and swipe fallen biscuit crumbs into their open palm before you have finished your tea.
IN my old house, moving ornaments or even covering coffee jars could, at a pinch, be excused as somewhat ‘creative.’ Obsessively wiping work surfaces is inexcusably stupid and shallow behaviour. It’s too easy, sometimes, to withdraw into domestic life and pretend all I need is my husband and kids and this house. But I don’t.
One early morning in 2009, I got a phone call to say that my brother had suddenly died. My husband had to drive me to tell my mother. The first call I made was to Helen and she was at our door in five minutes. In shock, I threw my life, my child at her and she caught them both. Helen is genuinely thrilled for me in my beautiful new home. But Helen doesn’t love me because I have clean work surfaces. She loves me because we have a laugh and we look after each other.
‘Fablongate is back,’ I said. ‘I need your help. Come to my house and eat biscuits.’ She bought me a signed copy of her new book and between us we left a ring of crumbs on and under the kitchen table for my husband to hoover up later. Wiping rehab has begun.