Áilín Quinlan: Grasshoppers, daisy chains, and that malfunctioning hob
Less mowing of the lawn means more wildflowers, with ox eye daisy, hawkbit and clover taking centre stage
Nothing.
What does a grasshopper have to do with the truism that a woman’s work is never done?
That housework is insistent, extremely sneaky and (no matter how short the short-cut) housework will always show you up in front of the righteous?
Absolutely nothing.
All the same, the mind has a way of sometimes connecting completely unconnected events.
So there I was one glorious afternoon, dozing in a deckchair and listening, with delight to the stridulation (now there’s a fine word for a Wednesday!) of a grasshopper.
This is an increasingly rare sound, sadly, and one that initially brought me back to a warm childhood afternoon when I was about six or seven years old.
My best friend and I sat in long grass surrounded by the chirp of grasshoppers, making daisy-chains to hang around each other’s wrists and necks. Pure contentedness.
Of course back then I didn’t know what stridulation was (it’s the sound produced by a grasshopper, often a male, rubbing its long hind legs against its forewings.)
Sometimes stridulation is about courtship. Apparently. Other times, science thinks, it’s possibly about rivalry.
As I sat there listening and thinking about this, the grasshopper’s song set my brain to retrieving another memory.
Ah, yes, there it was.
It was a downright crotchety reminiscence.
The subject of this memory started many years ago.
The hob was acting up.
First one small and not very important ring stopped functioning properly. Then another ring started going straight to red-hot the second I turned it on, even at the lowest heat level.
This was a time when I was always chasing my tail. I had a full-time job, a not-insignificant commute to work and a young family. The hob went on the “remember to get around to list.” Finally, the mother ring – the big one; the one that was in use all the time, began to malfunction.
Long story short, things burned, good food had to be thrown out and a saucepan was ruined forever.
Three hob-rings down, I got on the phone and a repair man came one Saturday morning.
In those days you could still find a repair man. (And the repair man would still come and you wouldn’t have to take out a second mortgage to pay him either.)
The man and my husband pulled out the cooker (in those days a hob and an oven and a grill were still all part of one cooker) so that the repair man could get at the bits he needed to fix.
As I went about my usual Saturday morning chores, I could hear the polite chit-chat between the men and the chatter from the kids as they ran in and out the back door.
Then a sort of unsettling hush descended.
Well, you couldn’t help but.
Both men, I twigged, looked a bit sheepish.
They were staring down into the narrow space that had become visible as a result of the bloody cooker being moved.
Then they looked in my direction with that kind of complacent, carefully non-judgemental look a lot of Irish men get when they know they definitely haven’t put a foot wrong but the woman has.
“What’s wrong,” I asked, putting down the laundry and hurrying over.
“Can’t you fix it?”
The man, who was, in fairness, a nice man, smiled uncomfortably and said that of course he could fix it.
“Have ye found a headless corpse in there or something?” I joked as I followed their glances.
Ah well. All down the side of the cooker were numerous shrivelled, prehistoric rivulets of God knows what; dried up boiled- over pasta water, runs of gravy, stew juice, frying fan splashes, spills from sauces.
The narrow rectangle of tiled floor at the bottom of this dreadful abyss was stained and dark, crusted and scattered with withered bits of old food, even some tiny bits of what looked like fossilized mince. It was disgusting and extremely unhygienic.
Nobody said anything.
You’d swear I’d farted or pulled my knickers down and mooned at them.
But of course, I hadn’t done any of that. What I had done, was commit the unpardonable (but female-only) sin of not regularly pulling out the cooker and cleaning behind it.
As a result, it was now a total tip.
“Try looking at the backs of the kitchen taps,” I felt like screaming.
“I haven’t done them over with a toothbrush, ever, so they’re probably manky too!
“Go on, touch the tops of the kitchen cupboards – there must be inches of dust up there since they were installed.
“Or check the fridge, for God’s sake! There’s bound to be hordes of fungus and bacteria crawling between the shelf fittings!
” I said nothing. What could I say? The men hadn’t said a word.
I walked away down the back of the garden and sat in the sunshine.
I listened to the grasshopper until my forehead stopped thumping and my throat relaxed.
Then I got into the car and went off to do the grocery shopping.
App?
