Cleaning

Sunday

Ruth Bloomfield

‘CleanTok’ and the psychology of spring cleaning

From our UK edition

Thousands of years ago, housewives living in what is now Iran would prepare for the spring equinox and Persian New Year by cleaning their homes from top to bottom. Today, ‘cleanfluencers’ on social media earn a living all year round by demonstrating how to keep your home sparkling. That might mean road-testing their new robot vacuum cleaner or going old-school and scrubbing grubby grouting with baking soda (spoiler alert: stain-removing toothpaste works better). Times have changed but the tradition of spring cleaning is alive and kicking.

Saturday

Lloyd Evans

Let men do the housework!

From our UK edition

Why are women still allowed to do housework? The question used to bother me during the years of my marriage when housework became a running sore between us. Perhaps the friction was inevitable. I was born in revolutionary times, the 1960s, and my mother taught me and my siblings to cook, clean and wash up for ourselves. We turned out as independent, self-sufficient adults. I would never ask a woman to make me a cup of coffee any more than I’d ask a bumblebee to build me a lighthouse. And doing jobs around the house suits my life as a writer. During the day I take frequent mini-breaks and do chores while my mind empties itself of clutter and my batteries recharge. Then I return to my laptop, renewed and refreshed. It’s like meditation – but with concrete results. Clean carpets.

Thursday

Bill McMorris

The war against slovenliness

The church sitting catty-corner from the former sushi place was the tallest building in Rosslyn, Virginia, not so long ago. It bears the cross and flame logo the Methodists adopted in 1968, the same year a local lumber yard donated the plot in the heart of Southern Baptist territory. Locals affixed a Catholic nickname to the brutalist structure perched above a filling station, “Our Lady of Exxon.” The tongue of fire engulfing the cross is the same hue as the neon informing passersby that Regular Gas is $3.399 per gallon ($3.949 if you pay by card). Things have changed in what was once a sleepy outpost of Georgetown. The gas station is now a Sunoco, and the Arlington Temple United Methodist Church may be the most perfect symbol of the GOP that was.

children

Thursday

Kara Kennedy

Confessions of a TikTok tradwife

Estee Williams was studying meteorology at college when she dropped out to follow her dream: being a stay-at-home housewife. Now, while spending her days packing her husband’s lunchbox and scrubbing the skirting boards, she films videos for TikTok in flowy dresses where she promotes a return to "traditional" values. Think Betty Draper minus the melancholy. She is the figurehead of the #tradwife movement. If you’re not familiar, the online tradwives are the product of a marriage between Instagram models and Fifties TV moms. They reject however many waves of feminism there are now and long for a return of the traditional nuclear family that once existed in America (for maybe forty years).

tiktok tradwife estee williams skibidi tradwife

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Life amid Catriona’s cleaning regime

From our UK edition

Earlier in this run of glorious October sunshine I was languishing on the bed in the middle of the afternoon not feeling up to much. The phone rang. Catriona. Could I manage to get down the path to help carry two heavy shopping bags back up to the house? ‘I’m on my way, mon chou’, I said, maintaining my customary ‘willing helper’ tone of voice. I went down the path in my pants, which could pass for thin shorts in the event of an encounter at the bottom with one of the neighbours. From here it’s a short climb to a dusty plateau were we park the cars. I gallantly refused Catriona’s offer that we carried a bag each, saying that I’d be better balanced with both. As we set off, Catriona slid on some loose stones and lost her footing.

Monday

James Delingpole

I could watch Marie Kondo forever

‘Talk to your crows!’ This precept should inspire us all as we begin the big, unknown adventure that is 2019. It’s going to change my life, that’s for sure. My wife’s too. That’s because we’ve both sat, increasingly enthused, through the first episode of Netflix’s eight-part series Tidying Up, presented by adorable Japanese tidying up sensei Marie Kondo, whose charming if rudimentary English I have just cruelly satirized. ‘Talk to your clothes,’ is what she was trying to say. Coming from a Western presenter this would sound like so much New Age airy fairy drivel. Coming from a beautiful Japanese woman with the serene aura of a Shinto temple nun, on the other hand, it comes across, somehow, as deep, wise and true.

marie kondo