I appear to have developed a sort of symbolic ritual that signals the beginning of the weekend.
During the week I have two sets of clothes at any time, I wear smart trousers and a shirt to work and t-shirt and jeans in the evening. This is some kind of throwback to when I was at school where it was considered the done thing by my mother to extract my uniform from me almost the moment I was through the door to wash it. “Go and change!”, she harangued, as I slouched about eating cereal and watching CBBC.
So, every evening I change my clothes. I prefer it too, it helps me switch between work and relaxing.
But on a Friday it is different. At lunch time I remove expired things from the fridge, throw them away, empty the bins. When I get home in the evening I start a bath running. I take all of my clothes of the week from the laundry basket and also what I am wearing and load them into the washing machine as the bath runs. I take the sheets off my bed and get a fresh set out ready to go on.
When the bath has been ran I start the washing machine off and get in to the bath. I either listen to a podcast or read, sometimes I play music. As I lie in the bath I am at my happiest of the whole week. Usually I have a rubber duck and shark floating around with me.
By the time I emerge from the bath, looking like a big pink prune the washing machine is done. Me, my clothes and my bed are perfectly clean – the entire week has been washed away. I don’t even have one dirty sock.
It is the weekend, work is over and the cleansing ritual is complete, dirt and stress all sluiced down into the sewers of Nottingham.
Then I can relax, until Monday morning when the whole hideous thing starts again. Late on a Sunday evening a sort of creeping disappointment approaches and looms over me as I go to bed.
Obviously I have other baths and showers and change shirts and t-shirts during the week too, but the Friday evening ritual cleaning is the most important. If I did all of this on any other day, as I’ve tried before, it does not work.
Only on a Friday evening. The ritual’s prescribed time must be adhered to or it fails.
And now, I shall go and run a bath. :)
This blog has no defined purpose other than to exist as a, mostly ignored, corner of the internet where things that I do can conjeal into a sticky mess and fester. I am twenty-eleven years old, single, I live in Nottingham, UK, I sit at a desk prodding data all day and in the evenings I study Art History, usually without any trousers on.
