The washing up geek.

I suspect that when most people are faced by what seems an inherently boring task such as doing the washing up they respond by either putting it off as long as possible or, when they do get around to doing it, paying as little attention as possible or getting someone else, or a machine, to do it for them.

Back in the late 70's and early 80's I spent most of my time living in shared student houses where washing up was always a major bone of contention. In one house I hid most of the surplus pans so that, rather than just getting another pan out of the cupboard, my house mates were obliged to clean up at least one of the dirty ones we'd already got. The least contentious way of managing shared cooking turned out to be to make the cooking and washing up a combined task. If it was your turn to cook it was also your turn to do the washing up.

Unlikely as it may seem I have been able to have a few decent conversations with people about the basic principles behind washing up. A simple one, which comes from experience camping when there's not a lot of water to go around, is that at each stage of the process you get the water as dirty as possible before getting rid of it and moving onto the next. But, by and large, and this includes my present housemates, these are discussions that most people simply don't want to have. Indeed, they're discussions that my current housemates won't let me have. I might try to explain the logic and science behind my way of doing things but that requires an attentive, and definitely not hostile, audience. So, even though there are reasons behind what I do, I never get the opportunity to explain what they are. 

Most readers will be familiar with the sense of frustration you get when you're prevented from completing a song that you've started singing. Well us poor compulsive didacts get the same feeling when our attempts to explain something aren't allowed to run their full course.

So, this illustrated post is my way of relieving this frustration.

Someone has been doing some cooking and this is how the working part of the kitchen has been left.

The starting state of the kitchen

The draining board is full of washing up from the last session and new items are beginning to pile up. Some things have made their way into the water left over from the last session and are having a soak.

Sink and draining board at the start

The first, and I'd say obvious, stage is to make space by putting away the now dry crockery and cutlery from the previous session. 

Stuff put away and drainer now clear

Stage 2 is to get the worst off using the water left in the bowl from the previous session.

Items have been swilled clean and the dirty 

water from the bowl disposed of down the sink

Previously swilled items can now be put back into the bowl so that those which will be stacked first, on the right hand side of the drainer (to avoid dripping water on stuff that's already draining), can be washed first. In the following picture you'll notice a small amount of washing up liquid in the cereal bowl in the centre. The basic technique is to slowly run hot water into the first item, clean it with a brush or nylon scourer tipping the left over soapy water into the bowl ready for the next item. The first item is then rinsed under the slowly running water and stacked to dry. Repeat for each item with the bowl slowly getting more full of water.

Previously swilled items in the bowl about to be washed

Greasy items with hollow interiors can be swilled by simply scooping a bit of water from the bowl and then disposing of the dirty water down the sink. This avoids getting a lining of grease in the bowl. 

Getting the worst off a dirty frying pan 

without contaminating the water in the bowl

Finally, everything has been cleaned, stacked and in 10-15 minutes will be dry enough to put away and for the process to start all over again.

Everything washed and drying with 

water left over to swill off the next load

For the sake of completion just a word about stacking patterns on the drainer. The basic principle is that bowl shaped items (where even plates can be thought of as shallow bowls) are stacked with the smallest to the right so that the bigger ones effectively contain the smaller but without touching.

+ On this occasion I used a measuring jug to see how much water I'd used and it came to about 2.5 litres.

Postscript

This post began a long time ago, in pseudo philosophical style as "A dialogue concerning the washing up" I can't remember why the two protagonists were titled A and M but, so that you can see where this particular strand of geekiness comes from, here's how it started.

M. "I understand that you've a long history of annoying your housemates by being seeming to be obsessed with the "correct" way of doing the washing up. What's that all about?"

A. "Well, as a student I briefly worked in a hospital laundry. Loading the washing machines, transferring wet washing to the spin dryers and then loading the tumble dryers was men's work. The women then took the dry laundry from the tumble dryers and ironed it on vast ironing machines. None of the work was particularly exciting but I made my own amusement by working out the most efficient ways to transfer the washing between the various stages. Now it just so happened that we were being assessed by time and motion men and at lunchtime I'd chat with them in the hospital canteen about their work and whether or not my enthusiasm for efficiency would cause problems for the other workers."

M."So you then realised that you'd got a thing about doing things properly?"

A. "Not so much that, more that the way I found to deal with the incipient boredom was to think about what I was doing rather than day dream about something else.  During my second week on the job we were joined by another young temporary worker who wasted no time in letting everyone else know how crap he though the job was and I left because I simply couldn't bear to hear him being so thoroughly disrespectful to the other workers who had little choice but to get on with the job."

M. "So how does this fit in with the washing up?"

A. "Well its simply just another task that you can either choose to belittle and attempt to ignore or you can deal with the boredom by thinking about what you're doing."

M. "So what washing up wisdom have you got to impart?"

A."Well, the first thing you need to know is that I still do it all by hand. The kitchen we inherited is fine but the spaces under the work surfaces are tight and without major reconstruction there's no way we could actually accommodate a dish washer without major disruption. Anyway, my first principle would be that you can't start the washing up until you've cleared a space to put the stuff you've washed up. This means putting stuff away."

Cardboard

From the late 60's to the mid 70's I followed Leeds United all over the country. Unlike today, going to top flight football was still a cheap afternoon out, you didn't often need ticket reservations and most of us preferred to sway on the terraces rather than sit in the stands. 

My Dad, who never really had much idea of what was going on in the game, but liked the spectacle, often came along too and we'd use the car park of an industrial unit not far from the ground. The first time we did this we simply said to the guy on the gate that it was "Mr Sharp", he just presumed that we were supposed to be there and, for subsequent games, even kept a space for us if we were a bit late.

I'd get to most other games by catching the supporters' bus from Harrogate, though there was one memorable occasion when my Dad did drive us down to the match at Nottingham Forest. Stood opposite the main stand, which had the dressing rooms underneath, at half time we noticed what looked like flames coming from under the seats. Within ten minutes the stand had emptied onto the pitch and, instead of watching the second half, we were entertained by firemen attempting the quell the flames with water from the nearby River Trent. By the end all that was left was a smouldering heap of timber. The unfortunate headline in Goal magazine that week was  "Leeds ready to set fire to Forest".

Later that season I went to the penultimate game of the season at Anfield ( Liverpool) where a goalless draw gave Leeds the championship. With the Leeds team heralded by the home fans, I left the ground in good spirits and made my way back to the bus. As we were going past Stanley Park I had my scarf nicked, protested loudly and got beaten up for my troubles. It turned out that I'd got a cracked coccyx (the vestigial tale bone at the bottom of your spine). It might have hurt but at least gave an excuse not to play cricket at school: A dangerous game where the fast bowlers could spot any sign of weakness and where my usual tactic was to daydream on the boundary keeping well out of the way of that horrible hard ball. 

Leeds United taking tributes from the Kop (28/4/1969)

Since these were the olden days, we used to spend most of our time playing out; climbing trees, making dens in the woods, dams on the beck, tracking on our bikes and generally being places we weren't supposed to be. A lot of time was spent playing football on the fringes of the local cricket pitch. I knew I wasn't very good but, even so, for many years a good part my fantasy life revolved around suddenly developing real talent and somehow being discovered by the scouts at Elland Road. 

As a slightly distant child, who always seemed to be thinking about things that the other boys weren't, who often missed the jokes (because of a strong and surviving tendency to take words at face value), who never got picked first for any of the teams and hung out more with the girls than was considered normal, I longed to fit in but didn't quite know how to do it.  One of the signs of fitting in was to be given a nick name and eventually, one day, I was, "Cardboard".

Now I'd always presumed they'd called me this because of my general obliviousness to standard boyhood humour, but a couple of months ago, more than 40 years later, I finally learned the truth.

My mother was in a cafe in Ripon when she recognised one of the other customers as one of my early playmates. They spoke about the past, what he and his 3 brothers were up to and the nickname they'd given me. It turns out that it had nothing to do with my slow response to jokes, which (being differently stupid*) I'm well able to live with, but with something altogether more undermining. During all those games of football it turned out they thought I was as much use as a cardboard cut out.

Even though it's a long time ago, and those particular fantasies have been successively replaced by others that have turned out to be similarly foolish, I found this surprisingly upsetting. It seems that the judgement of your peers can cast a very long shadow.

* A politically correct term I fondly imagine I formed for myself when an acquaintance learned where I'd been to college and said "you must be quite clever"

An open goal (draft)

This is a blog post that started being put together a long time ago. The basic idea was to gather evidence supporting the extremely simple proposition that if we took seriously the task of getting people to be more active there would be very large benefits to public health and personal well being. In addition, it would mean that the overstretched NHS would see fewer people coming through the door with entirely preventable illnesses and be better able to cope with the rest. It might also have made the point that what we've got at the moment isn't so much a health service as an illness service.

I'd already produced a few posts on this topic. Most notably the first "If it were a drug" and a follow up "The cost of sitting around in North Yorkshire" that used official studies to estimate some of the costs of physical activity in my home county 

So, what follows is the draft post as I find it today, including the slightly weird introductory paragraph that looks like it belongs somewhere else. I can only suspect that I was going to mention the organisation "Transport 2000" (now re-named The Campaign for Better Transport) that looked forward to the days when we'd take walking and cycling seriously as ways of getting about our towns and cities. 


As a child I used to imagine what it would be like in the year 2000. Apart from the obvious personal calculation - I'd be 46 - there was also the assumption that we'd lead our lives in very different ways. The millennium now feels like quite a long time ago. 

One in three cases of Alzheimer's are preventable

Inactivity drives obesity? 

Obesity linked to urban design and time spent in a car

Six seconds of exercise

Dr Bhaskaran said he hoped the findings would help governments take "courageous action" to tackle the obesity. "It will require action in various different areas. We need to look at how the most offending foods are the cheapest and most available and how [towns] are not set up for activity. We need support for people to lose weight. It is a big challenge."

Walking and cycling to work improves well being.


Thrill seeking sedent at The onion

Lancet article on health impact of physical activity (used in HIPI)

Promoting cycling is good for jobs

Fitness not fatness

Car dependency and mental health

Physiological dysregulation

Lack of adequate appreciation of physical exercise's complexities can pre-empt appropriate design and interpretation in scientific discovery

2012 Nice Report "We all face barriers in changing our lifestyles and many of us feel we don't have the time or the inclination to add regular physical activity into our lives. But walking and cycling – to work, to school, to the shops or elsewhere – can make a huge difference. It's an opportunity to make these activities part of normal, routine daily behaviour."

Royal College of Psychiatrists. Physical activity can reduce stress, anxiety and depression.

American retirees are looking for walkable communities.

NHS report An hour of exercise might compensate for an office life style

Active lessons can boost learning. Loughborough Universtiy project

Cars are the new tobacco  Journal of Public Health 2011

Psychology of attitudes to cycling

Barriers to cycling

Them and us Myth of the blameless cyclist

"This is the other key point – free parking is fundamentally regressive, a subsidy to people who tend to be richer than average. Many politicians, and newspapers, see the car as the default travel choice for everyone, and of course if you’re outside a town or city, often dreadful public transport means a motor vehicle might be your only means of getting to the nearest hospital." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/02/free-hospital-parking-daily-mirror-jeremy-corbyn

Walking with your doctor ?

Moderate or vigorous Try the "talk test" 

Exercise can slow the aging process ( a study of elderly cyclists)

Get up now and then and move about (the benefits of breaking up prolonged sitting) With particular reference to Diabetes

From Public Health England 2018

"Over the past 30 years, physical activity has declined significantly in the UK. For example, in England, the average distance walked per person per year for transport purposes fell from 255 miles in 1975/76 to 192 miles in 2003. Distances cycled fell from 51 miles per person per year to 34 miles over the same time period, while car use increased by over 10%. Although the average commuting  distance is increasing, one-fifth of all journeys of less than one mile are made by car.35,60 The proportion of the population in an occupation requiring substantial physical effort has also declined." Tackling Obesities: Future Choices – Project report

A study of Children's independent mobility. Mayer Hillman, John Adams and John Whitelegg.

Cars don't just choke children they tear a hole in our communities. George Monbiot

Car ownership and the rise of extreme individualism. George Monbiot

Motor vehicles and the impact on quality of life in urban areas. A study in Bristol

The lifestyle factors that cause cancer – and why many people are still confused by the risks from The Conversation.

Tip of the tongue moments less likely in fitter older people.

Ditching the car may reduce the risks of heart disease and stroke by almost a third.