February 21, 2020, by Jem

The Top One Washing Up Tip

Washing up is awful. If it weren’t for washing up, then I would perhaps cook. I do cook, but nothing complex, just small portions of ravioli – one pan meals. If washing up was pleasant, I would cook two or even three pan meals that involve knives, chopping boards, sieves, whisks- but it isn’t pleasant. It’s a bad activity.

Please don’t take me for a Fauntleroy, I don’t mind getting my hands dirty. Heck, I have even worked as a pot-wash boy. Washing up was once my job. So actually it’d do you quite well to cup your favoured ear to my washing up tip/truths/facts/theorems/stratagems/tactics concerning rinsing. (I have one washing up tip, but it is the only one worth knowing.)

Master Your Nervous System

As you know, when your skin comes into contact with something hot, you’ll instinctively spring away from the hot thing and, if you’re a bad person, you will swear as well. Anyone with an ounce of general knowledge will know the name of this instinct to be ‘the withdrawal reflex’. Scrap it. Ignore it. Ignore this reflex until it gives up trying to control your life.

If you ignore the urge to pull your hand away from boiling water, you will quickly realise that it is just about bearable, pain-wise, so long as you squint, tense, and grimace. What also helps – if you can manage it whilst wincing – is grunting out a chant to distract the mind. Suggested chant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmBz5eGXB3o

The withdrawal reflex then, is an overreaction, a bad habit.

Why am I telling you this? Because, if you can learn to tolerate the feel of liquid heated up to one hundred degrees Celsius, washing up becomes as easy as a Summer romance. The water literally melts through sauces, stains, bricks of fat, porridge, all in the blink of an eye, murdering germs, microbes, and all cell matter in the process. Also, handling boiling water tempers and hardens the skin of your palms, improving striking.

Be careful though with plastics and Tupperware….

Here, a cautionary tale:

Once upon a time, my body was at the sink but my mind was in the clouds. I was dreaming of daisies and Sweet Williams and bees and flies, and some squirrels that weren’t on edge for once. Meanwhile, I was absently pouring the kettle’s livid water over my sandwich box. A flash of hot steam woke me from my garden dream, and I looked into the sink to find my sandwich box had become fluid. There was a hissing chemical stench and I saw my box run down through the plughole. I studied the sink basin but found that not one trace of the thing had been left behind; not even one of the little clicky handles had survived, so there was nothing for me to scoop up as a keepsake to remember it by.

I sent a single tear down into the sewers after my flowing sandwich box, and whispered out a wish. I wished for the tear to meet the Tupperware fluid at some peaceful place down there in the pipes, and become part of its plastic river, placing us together again.

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