A good clean spring.

Apparently it's spring. Someone needs to tell the weather. Despite it not feeling very spring-ish, I've twice recently had people tell me about their spring cleaning activities. "I've been having a sort-out," one friend said. "I don't know what's come over me," another friend said, "I keep cleaning and tidying." I guess, at the end of the day, we're all just animals and subject to the same sort of seasonal rhythms and fluctuations they are. Doesn't that Jordan Peterson fella think we're all basically lobsters? Perhaps even a lobster likes a good sort-out after hunkering down for the winter, down in his octopus's garden. So, anyway, here are ten spring cleaning tips inspired by the notion of spring if not the actuality, and by something I read in The Times last week, which I am shamelessly pinching because I'm busy with not much time to write something fresh.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/down-and-dirty-how-clean-are-you-really-mtw7cbt5b

Filthy in bed

1. Wash your duvet. Not your duvet cover, your actual duvet. Apparently we should do this every three months. I know! Still, worth doing at least once, I reckon. Pillows too. A new pillow can double its weight in two years owing to the accumulation of dust mites, apparently, the average bed contains ten million of the buggers. Duvet covers and sheets should be washed once a week at 60C to kill them all off. Also, make sure you pull the duvet back to air the bed each morning. 

Plant pleasure

2. Clean your houseplants so they can better absorb the sunlight they need to grow. I love plants. I reckon they're important for our spiritual well-being as well as our physical one (they put oxygen back in the atmosphere). There's one plant in particular in our kitchen that I've had a long time, it was the off-shoot of one my grandfather had. I talk to it often and water it whenever it droops, which seems to work because I've had it for... oh my God, I've had it for 25 years!

Best foot forward

3. Wash your front door and polish your door furniture. Look at it this way - your front door is you putting your best foot forward, it's the first thing people see as they approach your home so make it look nice. London streets are dirty and traffic fumes make front doors and windows grimy. Spring is the perfect time to buff them up. Or get a guy in to do it.


A clean sweep

4. Go outside and sweep the garden when the snow thaws, either the decking or the patio, whichever you have, give it a nice post-winter once over. Sort of like combing your hair after a long and troubled sleep.

Food fetish

5. Clean all the places you put food - like the oven, the fridge, the bin, maybe even the microwave, which in our house gets sorely neglected because it's under the kitchen island tucked away and we forget about it so it stinks of the last thing someone put in there, like an M&S chicken tikka masala, just to take a random example.

A throw away line

6. Chuck out - old jumpers, old paperwork, old shoes.

Drawing the line

7. Get the car washed. (I draw the line at doing this myself).

Sponge bath

8. Change your washing-up sponge. Okay, so, this shouldn't be once a year either, more like once a week, at least. It says in The Times that you should disinfect your sponge after use, every time. Yeah, right. Some of us have a life.

Mobile filth

9. Mobile phones are covered in bacteria. Faecal matter was found on one of six smart phones tested, and not only those that got dropped down the loo because you forgot it was in your back pocket when you pulled your jeans down (this is purely a hypothetical example). Give it a wipe then, I guess. Don't put it in the washing machine on 60C because you forgot it was in our back jeans pocket. Again, a purely a hypothetical example.

You're worth it

10. Give yourself a spring clean as well, because you're worth it. That space between the toes where black bits gather from socks, the tummy button where there's always purple fluff even if you never wear anything purple. Maybe even have a bit of a shave here and there too, then go and get your toenails sorted ready for summer: a full pedicure and nail polish. Girls could do this too. 

Love E x

@DOESNOTDOIT

P.S. Here's something lovely about spring cleaning, from a mole...

The River Bank

The Mole had been working very hard all morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said, "Bother!" and "O blow!" and also "Hang spring-cleaning!" and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, "Up we go! Up we go!" till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.

Now tell me that's not one of the loveliest things you've ever read. You can't, can you? Ha.