Of Grime, Agas and Woodlice

A week on from my lonely vigil in the new house and we are feeling settled already. We returned à deux last Friday, to live like squatters, with minimal furniture and possessions piled where they stopped moving. A steady flow of deliveries, from kitchen table to Japanese secateurs, has made the house feel more complete, and filled an entire garage with empty packaging material. So it is that I can write this sitting properly at a table, gazing out of the window at the Sold sign that no one has taken away (has any estate agent ever taken away a Sold sign? Don’t they need them for other properties they’ve sold? Is there a landfill site somewhere filled entirely with Sold signs?). 

And I’m sure the thing you are most interested in, knowing us as the couple who swore they’d never move to the country, is Any regrets so far? And I can definitely report no; we love it here, and we have both found the house a very homely and welcoming one. Apart from the dirt. 

You may remember I wrote in an earlier post about the couple we bought the house from, both dentists (is it just me that finds the idea of a dentist household disturbing? I imagine it gets close to bed time, and a plaintive voice says “Could I just look in your mouth? Pleeeese? Or if it’s mutual filling examination, their pillow talk would be reduced to “Aaaaah-eeeeh-ooooorr-uuuuh”). Now we have had a chance to contemplate their legacy, they are immortalised in folklore as the Dirty Dentists. Unimaginable levels of grime greeted us. The kitchen took four days to pass a Public Health inspection. We never want those dentists’ fingers in our mouths, thank you very much. 

"Another cocoa, Marion?"

We don’t think it’s dirt related, and as townies we just assume it’s a country thing, but we weren’t prepared for the number of woodlice appearing indoors, like Snow White’s animal friends responding to the clarion call. Except we haven’t managed to train them to do the housework. They move in a disconnected convoy, too far away from each other to suggest any kind of organisation or intention. They trudge with grim determination, like the doughty protagonists of a Thomas Hardy novel, across the field of our carpet. Where are they going? And what do they think they’ll find when they get there? Wouldn’t they rather be snuggled under a brick in the garden, with their woodlouse friends? 

Sometimes you find one climbing the stairs, as if it’s heard rumours of a woodlouse El Dorado up in the sky. When they get to wherever they were going, they inevitably die. Maybe this is some grim equivalent of the upstream migration of salmon. 

On Day Two we decided to stop ignoring the Aga in the kitchen (it’s possible to ignore, on the basis it has a “normal” cooker next to it). We were now Country Folk after all. It was time to embrace traditional practices, like burning your arms on the Aga’s deep oven. We approached it with trepidation. We put a kettle of water on the hob plate. It boiled. We did it again. It boiled again. Flushed with excitement, we put two slices of bread on the top oven shelf. They toasted. We put jacket potatoes on the lower shelf. They baked. What devilry was this? A hot thing that did cooking? We were hooked. We were a step closer to having a column in the Sunday Telegraph 

On Day Three I decided to put into practice the oath I had sworn to become a vegetable gardener. The dirty dentists had left a series of vegetable patches, handily next to a wall for the convenience of the slugs and snails who were already rubbing their equivalent of hands at the sight of me come to grow them some breakfast. True to dentist form, half the patches were choked with weeds. Oh no, wait a minute, I think that one’s rhubarb. As I was saying, just under half of the patches were choked with weeds. My gardening book said just hoe the weeds and they’ll disappear. Yeah, right. I hoed the weeds. They disappeared. A surge of revelation overcame me, like Keats on first looking into Chapman’s Homer. I could do this. 

Could be spinach

I realise I will be obliged to report on my progress, but I am prepared to declare publicly my intention to be an organic gardener. I will have to deal with my slug and snail friends by hunting them down and evicting them under torchlight. I will proudly load my trug with shrivelled produce full of holes. And in any case, Helen has just told me it’s going to snow next week, so that will be the end of the crop I’ve just planted. No self sufficiency just yet.