Camino bore: What the camino has done for me! Plus household hints.

That word! Camino, I mean! I said I wasn't going to mention it! But up it pops into my thinking again, and while in the bath I'm getting all excited at the thought that 'the camino has done its work' - some of it - and that maybe it is 'hidden', even from me! Oh I do HOPE so! Aaaaaaanyway, I was thinking of doing a page of household hints based on my own experience as a BBP. That's Bohemian Bi Polar. You will need a definition of Bohemian to go on, and in my case it is something I heard some time ago:

"Bohemians are people who wash up before a meal rather than after it." 


Simple, isn't it! I hope you know just what it means! Of course, it is about much more than washing up; this is just an example of the kind of behaviour that comes naturally to me. I was going to include a pic of me eating the main meal of the day in the bath at 2.30pm, but in the end I decided that poppadums didn't play well in the bath, so I got out to eat.

Anyway, my discovery is that I have achieved full and total acceptance of my condition, which is BBP. I'm going to work with it rather than against it. I say! I find that depressive people, as opposed to the manic depressives now re-named bi-polar, tend to be very sniffy and see me as a person with what they call 'mood swings'; the way I see it, I'm pretty much like THEY are, except that I'm not miserable ALL the time.

OK then, what is the first household hint? It's about vacuuming. I recommend that you have one of those see-through ones, a Dyson. That way, you can see how much dust & fluff comes up each time you use it, and preferably you will not use it very often so the amount will be substantial and very satisfying. Added to this, you will never have to say 'My vacuum cleaner has worn out'. This hint is suitable especially for bi-polar people. Did you know that they, we that is, tend to favour writing articles rather than books, because we need constant and regular feed-back, preferably saying how marvellous we are? Thus, if you write one article a week, you get a lot more out of it than writing a book every 18 months. Writing a blog every day, well..... I must say, I am OVERWHELMED by the support I receive! (Ummmm!) Anyway, this really IS about housework, as with one of the see-through vacuum cleaners, you get that reward of actually SEEING the dirt, without which it might never get sucked up at all.

The second hint for today is that you make a resolution like I have done to do about half an hour of housework a day, on top of the washing up you do before a meal. As much as that! I'm afraid so. But you will do much more housework if you plan to do half an hour of it rather than an hour, because then you might actually get started.

All this takes me back to me as a newly-married dewy-eyed young housewife, doing my best. One day, t'owd man (t'young 'un, then) told me that he really didn't like women who were 'obsessed with housework'. I can claim that ever since, I have been the perfect wife in this respect! I admit I started with a challenge, which was that shortly before marrying him, he had his stuff sent home from uni by means of one of those large trunks you see in films (his dad was a railway man, so it was cheap). The last time it was sent anywhere, he had packed it with some marmalade and some soap powder. What he didn't know was that when trunks got to Durham station, they were sort of rolled over and over like barrels. Thus when the trunk got to us... I don't need to explain why some of our books still have their pages stuck together with marmalade and smell very clean.

Look, no pictures today! I'm dashing off now in my other role as furniture woman, driving a big van.... Oh, OK then, the big van....