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."