Home Palette Media
The following articles mention, or are in line with, Home Palette.
Abhor the vacuum
by Richard Glover
slovenly behaviour wins over the need to be spotless
WHO'S buying all these books on house cleaning? A paperback called Spotless has been in the bestseller lists for the whole year. This week, the publisher, ABC Books, added a companion volume: Speed Cleaning.
And yet every house I go into looks like a bomb has gone off.
Is this the cleaning equivalent of those chef shows on TV? The more we watch Jamie Oliver cooking up a storm, the more likely we are to be eating Lean Cuisine off a tray at the time. Maybe it's the same story with cleaning: because no one can bother doing it, we sublimate our cleaning urges by reading about it.
Not that the book is useless. I've mopped up several red wine spills by simply opening the thing and pressing its absorbent pages directly into the stain. A copy left out on one's filthy kitchen bench can also give the impression of cleanliness, reassuring visitors that cleaning may have occurred at some point in the life of the kitchen, albeit not recently.
I've also found it useful to scatter copies over piles of washing-up. "A stack of pots with baked-on grime? Sorry, darling, I didn't see them underneath all those copies of Spotless."
Yet problems arise as soon as you try to read this stuff. The authors appear to have struck some sort of deal with the manufacturers of baking powder and vinegar. In various combinations, they are the answer to all of life's problems. Dog poo, insect attacks, red wine spills - whatever the question, the answer is baking powder and vinegar. Ask expert Shannon Lush about the death of the Murray-Darling, and the odds are she'll recommend flushing the thing out with vinegar, while dusting the banks with baking powder.
Imagine her at home: covered head to toe in a poultice of vinegar and baking powder, dousing her dog with red wine just so she can go him with the baking powder. She must be terribly popular at nightclubs, constantly covered as she is in white powder.
Balance is everything in the new ABC, so why can't we offer a competing volume, celebrating the slacker lifestyle? I'm happy to write one, in which I'll also sing the praises of baking powder. And here's the clever angle: I'll be suggesting it be used when baking.
Many deride slovenly behaviour, but it has its good points. For example: deterring thieves. The floor of my car now offers a 10-year accumulation of garbage. There's no problem hiding my valuables. I simply fling my briefcase towards the floor, whereupon it sinks from sight, swallowed into a sort of primeval slime of old newspapers and stinking squash clothes.