Have you ever started a job in the marital home, chaps, believing that what you’re about to do will please your partner but, as it turned out, you’d have been better off leaving things as they were? Well here’s a story that I got tied up with a few weeks after being discharged from hospital, but this isn’t an isolated situation. This stuff has followed me around years before my diagnosis…
I was dazed, and largely confused, but I knew I was on the up, because I’d risen to the dizzy heights of making a cup of tea all by myself. I’d had a bad reaction to a cocktail of anti-psychotic medication on the ‘whoopie ward,’ and the situation had left me with swollen fingers and thumbs, and not for the first time. As I was feeling a little less than useless I wanted to try and do more around the house, as my then wife was doing everything and working a full time job, but overall I was sick of people having to run around after me because of the condition I was in.
I could press buttons and manhandle certain things, by pushing them around, but I had next to no grip in my hands. So, in a drug-withdrawn stupor, I decided to clean the hall rug, thinking this would be a useful thing to do. Sadly, thinking clearly when you still have the hospital’s medication in your system isn’t something you should try and do. In fact, it’s a waste of time, but I decided to carry on regardless because that’s what you do when you’re on drugs like that. Yip, they”re are great at getting you going, but they’re rubbish when it comes to stopping you make a prat of yourself.
From what I could remember, which wasn’t much at the time, the rug in question had never been cleaned thoroughly. We’d had it about two years, and at one time or another, our pets had either thrown up on it or used it as a makeshift litter tray, so what I was about to undertake would be a good thing to do. Not only that, my little piranha could see I was making an effort in my recovery, and I would pick up a serious amount of brownie points into the bargain.
The original plan was to aim the rug over the washing line, beat it to death with a stick and then give it a good soaking using a watering can. Oh my social worker would’ve have been so proud of me, but I was running before I could amble. I hadn’t got the grip to hold a stick, much less thrash it about, and, having filled the watering can up, I found I couldn’t lift it out of the sink, let alone hold it up to the height of the clothes line, so I had to think of a plan B.
After rolling the rug up, I put a crease in it with my elbow and pushed it into the washing machine, and during a rational moment, I thought I’d better check how much weight the machine could take before I pressed the go button. Unfortunately, the clarity of this process faded away when I opened the instruction manual and tried to read it. In a minuscule type-face it mentioned something about not loading up the drum with more than six kilos of dry washing; so what’s that in English then, about four ounces? After taking the rug out, I put it back in the machine again and uttered the blokey-bloke mantra, “Aaaaah it’ll be all right.” No, it wouldn’t.
Of course, what I’d failed to take into consideration was just how much an eight by two foot rug might weigh if it was saturated in wet stuff but, driven by the simple act to please; I switched on the washing box and retired to the front room. I checked it from time to time, and it seemed fine, well, fine right up until it reached the first spin cycle that was. And I think it was at this stage that I noticed it was making a whole bunch of new noises, and they were definitely not as pleasant and homely as the old ones. I shuffled back into the kitchen, fag in hand and tea in the other, to witness the machine lurching, to one side initially, and this was followed by a constant strained heaving sound coming from the motor – whoops!
A steady flow of unnatural sounds continued emanating from the Persil eater and, on a scale of one to ten, I’d say we were heading towards the, ‘shit I think it’s going to explode’ mark. This became more evident when it began griding its loins in a bid to reach its maximum speed of 1400 revolutions per minute. The only way I recreate the sound today would be if I could force a 400lb silver back gorilla inside it and induce his first epileptic fit with the use of an E.C.T machine. (electro convulsive therapy) It was the type of sound you’d hear, even if you were in the shower. Well, maybe not the gurgling and the odd draining noises, but certainly the unusual gyrating and grinding cycle which I couldn’t find anywhere in the manual. But, credit where credit was due, for a machine that was seven years old it put up a hell of a fight!
The next piece of the machine’s interior that came into view was the concrete counter balance that used to sit on top of the drum, but I didn’t think there was much to worry about as it it only weighed about two stone! Imagine my joy when I discovered the motor still had a huge amount of life left in it, and it was still attached to the drive belt! My, how it thrashed about in the last throws of its life. I tried to turn it off, but the socket was behind the machine and as I didn’t want to lose an arm or part of my face in the process, I left it. The noise was horrendous, and it was banging and crashing around so much by now, it had begun to ‘walk’ around the kitchen.
At the peak of its rotations the noise was deafening, so I made my move and jumped on the bugger; this dampened noise a tad and halted its escape route into the garden via the back door but, at the first sign of electrical burning, I jumped off the near dead box, gave it its last rites and turned off the mains. In the final stages I heard the loose parts of the machine slump forward, and watched as they gently pushed open the door. There was one last sloshing sound, as the rug fell from the top of the drum to the bottom, and calm returned to the kitchen once more.
After a brief post mortem it came to light that I’d killed a perfectly working household appliance, and my keen and positive intentions had left me with a goodly amount of grey water, which spanned most of the kitchen floor. What use to be a finely-honed piece of spinning equipment was now just a box filled with loose metal, concrete and a semi-clean rug. My little spitting cobra wasn’t impressed!
Lest we forget…
Marriage. It is just one simple word. However,
it could so easily become a legthy sentence. (Keats minor)
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