May 2011

Drawing lessons have had some unexpected results, one of them has been the realisation that in order to avoid my husbands head exploding, I must employ a cleaner.

I do not notice dust. I am oblivious to mess. Clutter surrounds me and I don’t see the tottering pile of books on the coffee table until I realise that I can only see half the television screen. Considering I only watch bits of the world news and masterchef at the moment, I am quite surprised I even noticed at all.

There is a spider web growing at an alarming rate in the corner of the kitchen and when I first spotted it, I spent quite some time observing the fact that daddy long legs build an inverted cone shaped web that is really quite pretty.

I do the barest minimum housework that it is possible to get away with. I don’t wash windows, I don’t dust or polish, now that I don’t have small children who like to eat their food off the floor I don’t mop, sweep or vacuum.

I admire tidy people enormously. There is something quite soothing about a lovely clean space free of cobwebs and dust. Tidy houses are very nice to visit but they also make me nervous and I worry that I am shedding dog hair from my skirt onto their tidy floors.

Also, I  wonder where do the spiders live in a tidy house?  I wonder, if  the spiders aren’t happily occupied in a corner of a messy room, if they will leap out at you like eight legged ninjas and go for your throat from sheer frustration because you keep on wrecking their webs.

Now where was I going with this post? Oh yes that’s right distractions.

It was whilst I was researching myself for the written component of my drawing class,I found this quote in a book.

On the other hand if too absorbed in their special interests they can become careless or oblivious to more mundane concerns. Not uncommonly they rely on others to take care of these matters so they don’t even have to think about them. Thus although they live up to their responsibilities on the universal and sometimes on the social level, on the personal level they might quite regularly shirk their duties.

Reading that line was like one of those light bulb moments, except I resisted the urge to shout Eureka! I have long wondered at my total inability to create any sort of order around me and even when I try really, really hard to be neat and tidy, the clutter just explodes. It isn’t just  because I am totally disinterested, lacking the housework gene, or even as my father would tell me, lazy and useless, it is simply because of the day I was born. Phew. Now that I have worked this out, I no longer feel guilty about my total lack of orderly skills and I can happily employ a cleaner to come up here and create some order for me. And believe you me I will not be one of those women who embarks upon a cleaning frenzy before the cleaner arrives.

I have spoken on this blog before about how the subtle tones and lines of the clouds will make me completely forget, that I was outside for any reason other than to gaze at the sky, and think about those lines and tones on a pot.

Ten weeks with Glen, my drawing teacher has messed with my head a bit. Now instead of seeing twenty tonal variations I am seeing thirty. I was already a tad obsessed with shadows and light lines and the infinite possibilities of blacks fading into greys. Now I am tottering on the brink of something and I don’t know where I am going.

Whether this need to see, to look deeper will rend the fabric of my marriage as I become increasingly frustrated with “The Spouses” grumpiness and depression. Along with his maddening inability to see that even when my hands are not covered in clay, I am still working dammit, and that the housework isn’t even on my radar. I remember once, years ago when I was drinking he came in and nagged me about the mess in the kitchen whilst I was cooking dinner. I swept all the dishes off the sink onto the floor yelling that that now we really had a proper fucking mess. I am much less tempestuous now that I don’t drink but the principle is still the same. It is all relative.

Then I remember that The Spouse is broken and in pain and I love the grumpy old bugger. I am supposed to be his carer, not he mine, so I put my selfishness aside and I do the dishes and clean up a bit, all the while dreaming about large floor pots and stacks of woodfired plates.

The gas man slash plumber comes up here on Thursday to connect up my gas kiln. Whilst he is here he is also going to hook up the hot water cylinder to the slow combustion stove. After living with a temporary kitchen for over twenty years I am finally going to have my wood burning oven. It is all a bit sad really, after waiting all these years for my oven, I have lost interest in cooking.  Though I do have a good sourdough starter recipe I am wanting to make with the only apple from my tree this year. So we will have to wait and see if a working oven ignites my lost passion for cooking.

This is my temporary kitchen the photo was taken in the dark this morning. I am hard up against the slow combustion stove to take this photo

This photo was taken before I had my studio and I had set up a workspace in the space between the old kitchen and the new kitchen. I have put this photo in here to remind myself how frustrated I was when I didn’t have anywhere to work at all.

This is the new kitchen in the process of being built. I am leaning against the sink in the old kitchen so that you get an idea of the space. Once the sink is in and the water is hooked up I am going to get the cleaners in to dust the kitchen and living areas, which is a much bigger job than it sounds. They can also wash the windows and remove some of the older cobwebs. I will  be pointing out the cobwebs that they are not allowed to touch, as the spiders in the corner of the rooms are not hurting anybody and have as much right to live in this house as anybody else.

I am glad that I titled this post “Now I am even more easily distracted” as the title gives you a clue as to the rambly nature of the writing. So thank you for listening, now I am going up to my lovely large studio to finish off some work I started on Monday.

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