The domestic non-genius

Just a quick update on all that Blog Readability Test nonsense: it turns out that the whole thing was not only a load of old tosh, but some kind of Google rating scam to boot. See Topsyturvydom for all the technical details. Basically, the message is: don't go there, don't do it, and, whatever you do, don't get the badge to prove it!

Even I'd noticed that the 'Test' didn't seem in any way linked to, or mentioned on, the website it purported to be part of. But once again, old fuzzy-brain here didn't go the extra mile and ask 'why not?' People exhibiting greater intellectual rigour have worked the whole thing out, so thank goodness for them, I say.

I'm just too busy wrestling with the statutory tables for a book on tax planning while peering over my shoulder to check whether the various mounds of laundry (dirty, clean, wet, dry, folded, unfolded and waiting (ha! as if . . .) to be ironed) have started to creep round the door of my study to mock me in muffled textile tones.

Which nightmare scenario allows me to introduce, quite effortlessly, my Muse of the Day:


There are so many Domestic Arts blogs out there, and they're gorgeous to look at and beautifully lifestyley, and make the lowly 'rest of us' all feel duly inadequate, which of course is a very large part of the Point of them, one suspects (through one's jaundiced eyes).

But they are all so completely filled with beautiful, tidy, clean, exquisitely arranged things, that it's rather like flicking through a year's worth of Country Living unrelieved by advertisements for conservatories, stairlifts and home gyms.

Do these people's homes never contain small dishes of assorted Action Man feet, odd Barbie sandals, broken sparkly hair ties, wrinkled conkers and pieces of unidentified Lego? Do domestic artists' children not solve the conundrum of 'room tidying' by scooping both dirty and clean clothes into big armfuls and depositing them in the laundry bin tangled with some festering bath towels they accidentally forgot to hang up to dry before the stench set in?

Is there never jam on these people's Farrow-and-Balled walls or chocolate biscuit trodden into their hand-woven carpets? And - to return to my original embittered theme du jour - where the heck is all their family laundry and why doesn't it dominate their lives utterly, or, if it does, why do they never mention it in the interests of Balance and some small, underlying sense of Reality?

Ach, ignore me, it's just been one of those days.

The tenor of which brings to mind the beautifully printed Philip Whalen poem on Susan's Green Chair Press blog . . .