We live, and the things around us live, through daily care

The title is a line from Ilse Crawford's Home Is Where the Heart Is. On the opposite page is an open shed door with four spotless brooms hanging on the inside of the door.

It’s one of those lines that I’ve always just nodded along to, consisting of words I understand arranged into a sentence whose meaning I never knew I didn’t know.

Then one day I got it. Daily care means use, cleaning, mending. That’s how, on a very elemental level, we live. Our lives consisting of using things, cleaning and repairing them. The brooms in the photograph are brushed out at the end of the day to remove the bits and pieces that remain in the brooms in my garden shed. Clean tools are the mark of a good tradesman: mine show I’m an amateur.

When I was at secondary school, the bicycles we rode to school were, every week, wiped over, chrome shined and moving parts oiled - cleaning the chain in turps and re-oiling it was considered hardcore. The point of ‘cleaning your room’ is only partly a clean room, mostly it’s that the time spent cleaning that speaks to self-respect. Take it too far, and it’s mere compulsion that gets in the way of life and speaks to mental instability. The balance matters.

The more things we have, the more things we have to care for, to use, clean and repair. Some will get more attention, some less, and some none. I have a food mixer in a corner of my kitchen that gets wiped down from time to time but never used. I keep thinking food mixers are something I should use, and then never do. After a while I take them down to the tip. Most of the other things I have I use, and feel I should dust and clean more often than I do.

The fewer things we have, the more care we could take of them, and the older those things, the more care we need to take care of them.

In the life of a commuter, what gets daily care?

So much of what we use belongs to someone else, and we spend so little time at home, we have too little time to clean and repair. Take a look at people’s shoes: some haven’t been polished for months. And how long does it take to polish shoes? Ten minutes? Sure, clothes washing. Bedsheets. Towels. How about wiping the iron down after using it? Cleaning your mobile with a glasses-spray? Brushing the dust off the remotes around the house? When was the last time you cleaned the TV screen?

Sound silly? Try it.