Monday, November 09, 2009

Cleaning up...

Faceted St Andrews

On Saturday, Ellen, blogged about cleaning by including a clip from Withnail and I.

At the time it made me realise that we really could do with a purge ourselves - we've not got to the wonderfully graphic stage illustrated there but really we would do with cleaner carpets. But the vacuum is on the blink and in any case we need something stronger...

Did you ever have a school teacher who'd respond to your protests about the quality of your art equipment with

"A poor workman always blames his tools"

well today I had what seemed like a moment of enlightenment, I realised that the answer was because

"A good workman would never have consented to use those tools in the first place"

And so, following on from that I went virtual shopping for carpet cleaners...

And its with such fantastic leaps of logic that I turned feeling guilty about the carpets into the need to buy a new usable carpet cleaner... or two...

Incidentally what really struck me about the clip was how young Richard E Grant was then... so I've just looked it up on IMDb and found it was released in 1987... I suspect we all looked a bit younger then


6 comments:

Ellen said...

Occasionally I wistfully look at robot vacuums and imagine living the dream of one less chore, but then realize with 3 pets walking around, it would fill up too quickly and I'd be following it around and emptying it all the time anyway. They need to build a bigger one.

Withnail was Richard E. Grants first movie role I think, his absolute best in IMO.

Tinker said...

I'd never seen any of that movie before, and I'm not familiar with Richard E. Grant - but yes, I expect we all do look much younger than we did in '87 (and possibly with worse haircuts - at least mine was, as I recall. Had horrible puffy, poodle style bangs - fringe I think you call them - about then, lol).
Good luck with finding a new vacuum - we could use a new one ourselves. Just this afternoon, I used K's wet/dry shop vacuum on the hallway since the regular one wasn't picking up well. I wondered why it was so heavy (it's meant for garage/woodshops,etc, so just has a short cord with a long hose & doesn't really roll)- all the while wishing it had attachments - then discovered afterwards, it had all the attachments inside the canister! Of course, they were then covered with everything I'd just vacuumed up - leaving me with more things to clean...

Caroline said...

Ellen - besides having a very small capacity the robot vacuums I've seen would all fall down stairs rather than cleaning them - but then I've not looked at any of those recently as their price tags were so high.

How entertaining Teasel would find one!

Tinker - I had better hair then I think... oh dear... :-)

I think I've decided to buy an actual carpet washer and a light cylinder vac.

Dru Marland said...

what about hiring a great big carpet washer? I had a Vax that could wash carpets, but it was fiddly and faffy and didn't do a very good job, and everything was depressingly soggy for ages after.

Caroline said...

Dru - I'm rather hoping that they've improved... I have wondered how to find out if they are really better than they were...

Dru Marland said...

I just Googled "what carpet cleaner", and the answer seems to be http://www.consumersearch.com/carpet-cleaners/hoover-steamvac-with-clean-surge-f5914-900

-ta-dah!