The Right Suction

If you love and keep dogs, you must necessarily love to vacuum, even if, like me, you have a breed that doesn’t officially “shed”. The typical Norwich terrier coat goes through three cycles: coming into coat, in coat and out of coat. In the days when East Anglian farmers kept small packs of generic red ratting terriers (the rural-mythical ancestors of Arthur and Millie), these dogs’ dead top coats would have been pulled out by hedgerows and the like in the course of the dogs’ general field-flushing duties. Now, in a land whose urban borders are fences and rural boundaries barbed wire, the duty of stripping the dead coat falls to groomers and, while we wait for an appointment (February at the earliest), the general adhesive powers of carpets, furniture and those small dust bunnies that live in corners.

So it’s fortunate that my grandmother has passed on to me her small red Sanyo vacuum cleaner, which is the size of a large sandwich but sucks with a force previously unassociated with any composite foodstuff. The alternative would be eventually to subside beneath a house-wide pelt of red and black hairs, which, while they are the regional sports colours, lose something for being both dead and from a dog.

It was not always thus, with me and my willingness to vaccum. For a start, I am short, and operating most vacuum cleaners hurts my back (somehow the imagined housewife stands either at five-one or five-eight). And domestic duties have been among the last-to-get-back of those casual occupations rendered strange and terrifying by depression, back in the dark day. There was also the fact that, in my last big depressive spiral about five years ago, I was living with the world’s cleanest flatmate, whose young son once said to me brightly, “Mummy says your room looks as if it’s never been cleaned.” My former flatmate had had a terrible time with illness of her own early in adulthood, and exercised in her good health a microbe-dismissing control of her environment, which unfortunately at that time included me and my increasingly isolationist and dusty habits. Even when I moved into the casa di harvestbird, it was an embarrassingly long time before I could clean the house without being reminded of my flatemate’s not-so-secret opinions about my lack of housepride, which used to (predictably) shame me out.

However, such days are happily gone and the dogs and I sit, as I write, in our dustless paradise. All it took was the right suction administered at the right height and a long holiday from other people’s opinions. In housework, perhaps, so in life.