Category: hand washing

Hello, Matey

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Because, these days, you can buy soap which exfoliates, you see fewer pumice stones lying around bathrooms.

The bathroom in my Nan’s Balham flat had one; she was the relative charged with washing off all the grime I’d accumulated during various playtimes.   She’d say my neck looked like the Black Hole of Calcutta.  From this I assumed she’d been a missionary in India – in actual fact she had been a waitress in a central London Lyon’s Corner House.  She did watch a lot of documentaries, though.

No longer do we have to cobble together old bits of soap or have receptacles stopping soap turning from being a solid.  Perhaps this was how liquid soap was discovered?  Someone who’d lain in the bath for so long, the soap had turned to mush.  Archimedes perhaps?  Eureka does sound like the name of a soap – I’d have bought that in the ‘60s over Lux, Camay or Imperial Leather with its built-in stand.  Wright’s Coal Tar Soap was only necessary if you had miners as lodgers. 

The only time our bathroom accessories changed was just after Christmas after we’d have accumulated enough Bronnley’s bath salts to build miniature Pyramids. 

Rather than Mr Matey, Mum would put Fairy Liquid in my bath.  It did the job, and my hands were as soft as my face 😊

Although most bath times I didn’t care what was in it, all I wanted to do was sink the Bismarck.  This is not a euphemism, and nor is it the make of a German soap.

“And don’t forget to wash behind your ears, either!!” – could never have imagined Karl Dönitz saying that. /

End of the tier show

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As we approach the end of a rather bizarre year, there are words in 2020 which meant slightly different to when I was growing up in my Balham flat in the ‘60s.  

Corona: this was the brand of cream soda and cherryade I’d buy from my school tuck shop.

Quarantine: if you travelled back from a foreign land, this is what Rover or Tiddles had to do for the best part of a decade.

Mask: unless your occupation was a surgeon, highwayman or the Lone Ranger, the only time you wore a mask was playing Blind Man’s Buff or Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

Lockdown: when you’ve lost your door keys. Or someone’s escaped. 

Social distancing: what you did if you wanted to avoid certain people at your local whist drive.

Trump: a word used during a whist drive either pertaining to a suit of cards or flatulence. Or both.

Tier 1: what you give guests at a wedding

Tier 3: what you give guests at a Christening 

Tier 2: what people who really don’t need to eat more cake tuck into during a wedding

Tier 4: opening words of Ken Dodd’s signature tune

Bubble: a thing you blew, and in the process, got washing-up liquid all over your hands; now you need to douse your hands in Fairy while singing “Happy Birthday”.

R: used to be a letter, now it’s a number.

Zoom: was a lolly until 1982 when Fat Larry bought Lyon’s Maid. 

COVID: what Glamorgan is now called.

Vole steam ahead

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trees

Bit like being in the Scrubs, you are now allowed to leave your house once a day for exercise.
Because of the closure of gyms nationally, and therefore the need to find a replacement to my cancelled Zumba classes, I am taking advantage of this allowance from the correctly-advised government-induced curfew.
A few days in and I’m witnessing things near my house I’d driven past previously (probably quite badly as Lewis Hamilton I’m not) but can now stop and think and wonder which aspect of flora and fauna I’m looking at.
However, the disadvantage of having been brought up in urban south London, means my limited knowledge of nature is confined to the ability of being able to identify different dog turds. We did have trees, but they would either be goalpost one, goalpost two or a very thick cricket wicket. No one ever returned home saying “Mother, dearest, my friends and I managed to scale the entire height of a Canadian Redwood earlier.” (Also, because this was Tooting Bec Common and not a park in Vancouver)
Having escaped, like the TV programme to, suburbia, the nature-identification needs are far greater. Aside from identifying a dead mouse (it could have been a vole or a shrew, I’m assuming here) I’m struggling with my lack of knowledge.
Because of this ignorance I’m thinking of taking a series of educational books with me on my daily hike: The Observer Book of Birds; the Observer Book of Trees; the Observer Book of Dead Rodents.
Carrying the contents of a small mobile library could also act as a replacement for the free weights I use at the gym. I could strengthen my biceps courtesy of a book with several pages devoted to pictures of deceased gerbils.
I’m going out early in the morning for my walk. I’m at that age when I wake up early and have invariably done the ironing by half four. Walking around you notice many things about peoples’ houses: the porch lights which come on when you walk past (handy if you’re an aspiring burglar – which I could be as I suit black); as the houses get bigger, so the car number plates become more personalised (my car’s number plate is MDZ, which would work if my surname was Zither) and whose nets need cleaning.
Today, during my hour-long traipse, I passed four people, two running, two walking like me (the two walking probably having a copy of I-Spy in Suburbia tucked inside their newly-bought kagools. The normal British response would be to ignore any passer-by, but these are different times and I’m wondering what the correct protocol might be? Should I have said anything or even doffed my cap (or in today’s case, my Bayern Munich bobble hat)?
As this process continues then I’m sure we’ll all be talking – albeit shouting across various roads to each other, keeping a safe distance, obviously, “Did you see that dead mouse on Banstead Road?” “That was no mouse, that was an aardvark!”
This in turn will prompt me to return home and order the Observer Book of Ant-Eaters.
Time to wash my nets.

Lavez-vous maintenant les mains

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Handwashing illustration

The NHS has suggested singing “Happy Birthday” twice as the recommended duration for hand washing. Alternatives are the national anthem or La Marseillaise.

While every good Cub would have learned the national anthem (if you were a good sixer you’d learn the verse about “knavish tricks”), but few, being brought up in south London, would have had La Marseillaise high on their musical repertoire, unless your dad had been Charles de Gaulle, Charles Aznavour or Asterix.

Or, of course, if you had a French teacher at your school who decided to introduce a “Continental Evening” (as if the recent introduction of Scandinavian quilts wasn’t abhorrent enough).

At my Tooting school in 1970 we had just that.

Our class was to sing La Marseillaise.

It has fifteen verses.  Fifteen!!! (If you washed your hands singing that you’d end up with fingers like ET).

In 1970 we’d not even joined the European Community let alone left it; many of us were still smarting after the 1967 NON! rebuke by the aforementioned Charles de Gaulle (who, after retiring from being President of France, became an airport).

We simply learned the French words. This was to protect us knowing that the last line translated into English is: “To cut the throats of your sons, your women!”. In Tooting, in the early ‘70s, the only person who was likely to cut your throat was your barber if you’d tried to hide a copy of that week’s Parade up your jumper.

We duly learned the song and performed it in front of our parents. However, this foreign lark didn’t catch on in my house and after a week of being served escargots, mum reverted back to egg ‘n’ chips.

Vive la Révolution? bugger that, thought my mum.