Spin cycle

Donkey matters

Yesterday was an eventful day: there was no water in the morning and when I went to look the pump was blinking agitatedly. I reset it, to no effect, and then looked in the deposit, to find it almost empty. This meant a call to Gilberto, our plumber, and it turned out that the “pipe” (actually, more or less a garden hose) that brings our water in, had probably had a blockage, and air had got into the pump. All this meant a delay before I went to Ramblizo for donkey halters and a saddle. On the ground floor there are things like live partridges and dogs, and then there is a whole floor of bridles, saddles, halters and horse accessories where I spent a happy half hour choosing stuff. When I got back, I put the donkeys out and went to see what the men were doing rebuilding the stable: they have found me a proper stable door and fixed the fence. After about an hour, I saw Pablo yelling and waving at me from his side of the rambla: the donkeys had got away and ran into the rambla. That is, Luca, who spent most of the morning dancing about and biting, ran off and Penelope got so agitated that she followed him, managing to break the rope with which she was tethered. Fortunately, one of the builders, a South American, was a dab hand with donkeys and cut them off at the pass – actually, they came up quite docile and seemed confused as to why they had done it. They probably smelled Alberto’s mule and donkey, which are usually tethered down there. Meanwhile, Pablo came and did some equine consulting: Luca, being a male, is going to be a nuisance as he gets older, so we need either to castrate him, or sell him. At the same time, he is a nuisance now, because he is not properly weaned, and while he is with his mother, it won’t be easy to get him weaned; this drains her strength and also may interfere later with her pregnancy. And so on. Also, of course, he will try and shag her by the time he is about a year old. Well, he is very sweet too, I said, and Pablo agreed, he was “bonico” (a word they use a lot here, but which must be Andaluz, since it is not in the dictionary. The word for halter, cabezá, is also Andaluz, since the real word is cabestro – which Consuelo said was “más fino,” more refined.) A lot of local people have stopped and said how bonico he is, and stroked him, and when I suggested to Juan that he needed to be castrated at some point, he got very agitated and said it was not a good idea: there are no males round here so he could be very useful in saving people the journey to Murcia if they want to breed from their females. So that’s that, then. I didn’t mention that I was the one who had to manage the biting and the general behaviour that goes with a stallion, if donkeys are anything like horses. Well, he is not a year yet so we can cross each bridge as we reach it, poco a poco, as everyone here says all the time,

Home management consulting

Housework is still on my mind as well as my hands. It seems to fill all the available time, but shapelessly, like a huge, self-replicating amoeba. Various people have told me that “you have to have a routine,” but it is all very well saying that.

Such a routine must have existed, in the days when women taught their daughters how to do housework. In one of my childhood rhyme books, there was a poem that goes something like: They that wash on Monday, have all the week to dry/They that wash on Tuesday, are not so much awry… and so on, until the end of the week: “But they that wash on Saturday, Oh they’re sluts indeed!” Does this mean that if you wash your clothes on Monday, then you have the rest of the week to iron them, and wear them, or do other things? And since washing is cyclical, not secular, as we used to say in the City, does it make any difference if you start on Saturday instead of Monday? It is not like the roast, which you might cook on Sunday and then turn into things of increasing nastiness through the week, like Sandy’s mother apparently used to do, going via rissoles to soup until Friday, when you had fish.

In any case, I have not got the hang of it at all; how are you supposed to know when to stop? It is not as if you can even get a sense that it is 70% complete, like office stuff, or as if you have a Gant chart with columns that show you where you are. It is a shame that some smart management consultants haven’t come up with a plan you could buy in Sainsbury’s. When I worked for Accenture in Windsor, they used to we call a building, but which they called something like a facility, which had the shop of the future in it, so this would be right up their retail opportunity showcase. I expect they could offer to save you 50 per cent of your week and the marketing people would come up with a great name for the concept, something like Reengineering Residential Supply Chain Logistics: Solutions for the 21st century Houseperson. However, it would not work since no houseperson in their right mind could pay their prices.

I now recall Accenture with something approaching nostalgia: in many ways, it was the perfect workplace but for a long time I couldn’t really understand a word anyone said, and by the time I spoke the language it was time to go in case I went native. I missed things like going to lunch and gossiping. I was there for nearly 4 years, a record for me, but only because I was pregnant twice during the time so could not run fast. However, they were very logical people and the system always appeared to take precedence over the individual which in many ways is a lot better than companies that are the other way round; there appeared to be no sex or violence of any kind and hardly any windows. It had its drawbacks working for a place where everyone respected the law – like Switzerland, it was a bit boring - but it was better than being shouted at by the kind of boss who ought to be running Haiti.
Meanwhile, there is more washing to do and then at 3pm I go to make blood sausages with Juana. It is a busy life, and there is not much time for theory, except the sausage making kind. Things go round and round, like the washing in the machine, and you are back where you started. This is a very different way of looking at life than the kind you have in the city, where you see it more as a straight line, perhaps going diagonally upwards, or, if you are pessimistic, describing a J curve. I have a feeling from my faint memories of Immanuel Kant, that this is a teleological view of life, not a synchronous one – one that assumes that it has a purpose and an end towards which you progress, as fast as possible. After all, what is the word “career” if not something that a donkey does when you let it go? However, this is sense of direction is clearly an illusion: in my life in PR I must have met any number of sixty-something year old CEOs who have just been let down with a bump into retirement and go wandering around marginal drinks parties in London looking like burst balloons. Careers come to a halt and the people who were once important hit the dust, like Ozymandias, but somehow it’s one of those things you can’t take on board until it happens, like death. On this basis, however, housework is a much more sensible way to spend your time, since it clearly has no purpose other than to make you comfortable while you wait to die.