Skivvy

The wife brought it up the other day. Just dropped it into the conversation like a self-cleaning grenade.

"Why don't we get a cleaner?"

A what?

I confess I initially recoiled. Who the hell had she killed? This is what comes of waving a handgun around in the back of the car with the safety catch left off. One speed bump and boom. Death by hair trigger and then you have to spend the rest of the day being nice to Harvey Keitel while he picks some dude's brains out of your furry dice. And no, that is not a euphemism for oral pleasure.

Turns out the wife actually meant get a cleaner. A Mrs Overall. A Mrs Doyle.

A skivvy.

Someone to come and do for us (though that still sounds a bit Pulp Fiction-esque to me).

The wife's argument is thus: she and I both work full time, when we have any free time we are battling a constant malaise of exhaustion that raising kids prevents you from ever giving in to so you keep pushing and pushing yourself with the end result that your effectiveness as a careerist / parent / homeowner shrivels down into a depressing spiral of endlessly diminishing returns.

Now I'm not saying that our home deserves to feature on a Channel 4 documentary fronted by the spectacularly fronted Jasmine Harman (though she's more than welcome to rifle through my Tallboy any time she likes) but, you know, sometimes things get left. For a few weeks. And I put it to you that having water cress growing out of your draining board is not a look that will entice Nigella Lawson around for an evening meal. And that's even before she negotiates the sometimes tacky floor of the bathroom on her way to powder her nose.

We do our best but our best isn't good enough. Our best certainly isn't up to the 1950's ideal that my Nan and mum embodied when I was growing up. But, of course, looking after the home was and is a full time job in itself (especially when you throw young kids and cats into the mix) and they lived in an age where a woman having a career and going out to work full-time was unusual and, outrageously from the modern perspective, a bit of a talking point. Neither of them worked full-time in the career sense. Though in terms of labouring to maintain a spotlessly clean home they never bloody stopped.

So. We - Karen and I - are considering hiring a skivvy.

I feel surprisingly ambivalent about it.

My first reaction was kind of an inverse snobbery borne of my thick overlay of working class ideals and a deep sense of class embarrassment: what the hell would my friends say? What would my mother say? My second reaction was to begrudge the money: are we really going to give away hard earned moolah to someone else so they can come into our home and do the jobs that we would and could do (albeit haphazardly) for free? My third was the English Man defending his castle stance: have some grubby faced dole-ite invading our home, pocketing our loose change and hijacking our wifi when we're not looking?

Was my wife utterly mad?

But as the idea has lain with me and snuggled up softly, gently pushed sugar kisses into my ear and raised its eyebrows suggestively I have started to see the positives.

(a) More free time and energy to do the things we really want to do. (b) A more hygienic, more healthy standard of living that the wife and I, the kids and even the cats would benefit from. (c) Someone who can scrub the bloodstains out of the backseat of the car for a lot less tin than Harvey Keitel asks for.

We shall ask for references naturally and have to think carefully about keeping any kind of monetary temptation out of view. My wife will be at home on the days the cleaner comes round. And my Lego sanctuary... er... "office" will be out of bounds to uninitiated duster-wielding hands.

With those provisos in place, I am slowly coming round to the idea.

So hello, Upper Middle Class.

Who knew that a slightly grubby lifestyle would lead so effortlessly to upwards mobility?

Au Naturale

Whilst looking for some nice pics of Jasmine Harman for my previous post (a very pleasant way to spend ten minutes) I came across this on-line "news" item – forgive the inverted commas but it is the News Of The World Magazine after all.

It seems Jasmine was given the opportunity to have a Photoshop makeover.

She gave a body beautiful wish-list to some computer graphics geek and - hey presto - he airbrushed and pixel-tweaked a picture of Jasmine to her own vision of perfection. The result can be seen above.

What is interesting about this "experiment" (‘cos it’s not just an excuse to publish a picture of a pretty woman in a bikini, no sirree, absolutely not) is that Jasmine didn’t like the results. She didn't like the perfect version of herself at all but preferred herself as she really is.

How refreshing, because I have to say that so do I. And for the same reasons that Jasmine cites. The perfect version looks unreal. Unnatural.

Now maybe this is just because the graphic artist was piss-poor at his job and his eye for (so called) perfection was as canted as most teenagers who only get to see a woman’s naked body when it has a couple of staples running through the navel or when it’s badly pixellated on porntube.

Or maybe some of us more enlightened folk just prefer the real deal?

There is after all something adolescent and immature about what constitutes (in men’s eyes at least) the “perfect” female body. Pneumatic breasts with nipples that forever point upwards no matter where gravity is pulling them. Washboard stomach as taut as a drum-skin. Thighs as smooth as fleshly applied plaster (by a professional obviously).

Women with those attributes only exist in top shelf magazines and the fashion glossies.

Literally. We all know they’ve been as airbrushed as Jasmine’s picture above (just more insidiously).

They don’t actually exist in the real world.

Such injudicious tweaking gives people – men and women – false expectations of themselves and each other. Well, this is hardly news.

But sadly we now live in a world where even the most outlandish expectation can be met if you have enough wonga to pay for it.

Which got me thinking. How many people who have plastic surgery to marry themselves up to some flawed idea of perfection end up secretly hating the result once the surgery and the healing process is over? Or wishing they could revert back to how they were before?

It’s a very expensive mistake to make. I bet Jasmine is pleased she merely went under a virtual knife than a real one.

As am I. I moved away from the airbrushed woman (homo-airbrushus) in my late teens early twenties. A real woman is always far more attractive and far sexier in my opinion – and yes that includes cellulite and boob-droop and a wobbly belly.

I just hope that all the women that sigh over chesty pin-ups like Daniel Craig and George Clooney secretly feel the same way about us men. Because believe you me, none of us are physically perfect either.

The airbrush doesn’t give a damn about gender… it just wants to sell a little more copy.

The Mormon Invasion

So we'd made it to Friday evening. The kids were in bed. The washing up had been done. All the chores were out of the way.

It was Quality Time at last. Curled up on the sofa. Big bar of choc. Jasmine Harman on TV shaking her impressive decolletage over various locations in the South of France.

And naturally the doorbell rings.

Cold callers.

Pains in the effing A.

I did the net curtain twitch and took a quick deco.

Two young guys. White shirts. One in a blazer. Both with neat little back-packs hung from their broad shoulders like turtle shells. Even before I'd heard the American accent I knew they were Mormons.

Here to spread to Word of God and save me from myself.

Well sorry. I was too tired to be saved so I ignored the doorbell.

It went again. A second time.

OK. OK. They were being persisent. But in my house that doesn't always pay. I was more determined than ever to ignore them.

Doorbell chimed for a third time.

Jesus!

(Though I kept my voice down when I said that.)

When are these guys going to get the message? Tom was asleep in bed and I really didn't want him woken up by two well-meaning God-botherers. I resolved that if they tried a fourth time I was going to march out there and give them a piece of my mind.

Then we heard a strange jangling sound. The sound of keys being pushed through our letterbox. The Mormons then headed over to next-door's house.

I went into the hall to investigate.

Sure enough, there was a bunch of keys lying on the mat. Not the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven I might add but our own house keys. Seems Karen had accidentally left them in the front door keyhole when she'd arrived home an hour or two earlier.

Boy did I feel guilty.

I'd been mentally slagging off these pure-hearts in my head and then they go and save me and my family from burglary and God knows what else.

Shame on me.

Thank God I hadn't answered the door though. I'd have felt even worse if, mid slag-off, they'd handed me the keys personally with a cheery, "There you go, sir." Their halos would have blinded me. I would have had to listen to them then. My guilt would have had me honour-bound to repay their kindness by listening to a sermon or two and maybe even admitting to the fact that I do own at least one Osmond record (admittedly it's "Crazy Horses", the one they released when they were desperately trying to raunch themselves up to increase falling record sales). I know how guilt makes me behave. I may even have invited them inside and offered them a cup of tea and a biscuit whilst chastely switching Jasmine off in favour of the The Chelsea Flower Show.

But thinking about it some more... maybe the way it happened was the right way?

I mean, I suffer a little post-irritation guilt and learn a lesson or two about the kindness of strangers... and they continue on their rounds taking pride in the fact that they've perfomed a Godly act of kindness in the face of total heathen ignorance.

Everybody's happy.

Isn't that how religion is supposed to work...?