Rest in peace

It is with great sadness that I have to announce the death of our dishwasher, Mr Bosch, at the tender age of 10. I was with him until the end when he started to malfunction. His passing was swift and he felt no pain. Not like mine, anyway. Bastard.

For a week or so now, until the new one arrives, I am once again the dishwasher, as I have been for most of my life and it does feel odd and slightly inconvenient. I had never expected a dishwasher to be so valuable and almost indispensable. Years of putting dirty plates and crockery into the machine and letting it get on with the messy part was fantastic. I have never taken its existence for granted, knowing, as I do, what a shit job washing up really is.

Growing up with my mum in our little house in Brislington, I’m pretty sure there were no dishwashers in existence. But then, we didn’t have a washing machine or even a fridge until the early 1970s. This was not because we didn’t fancy these new-fangled contraptions: we simply couldn’t afford them.

We did have an elderly gas-fired ‘boiler’, into which my mum would put clothes where they would be boiled. Once they had been boiled, you could then try to clean them. And once they were dry, mum would iron them on her elderly ironing board with asbestos on so you could rest the hot iron. Asbestos, mind? We used it for everything back in the day. And it never did us any harm, or not yet anyway.

How on earth, I hear you ask, did you keep stuff cool back in those days? The answer is simple: we didn’t really need to. Our pint of milk was delivered and consumed every day, we might have a small loaf of bread which would be in the bread board and anything would be in the pantry at the end of the kitchen. When I say ‘everything’ I mean nothing. We lived day-to-day. A fridge or freezer would have been of little use to people with nothing to put in them.

I always think back to those days when you read those dreary clichéd Facebook posts of how much better things were better in the old days. You know the ones – we all leapt about in mud, ate pure sugar all day, smoked eighty fags an hour and STILL TURNED OUT ALRIGHT! And all this without fridges, washing machines, dishwashers, the internet and mobile fucking phones.  How, pray, were they the good old days?

They weren’t for me, as we lived from day-to-day, hand-to-mouth, my mum constantly fretting about where our next meal might come from (although it always did come along and she never told me that until she was in old age). Almost everything is better because the golden era that is the past wasn’t golden at all. We still had paedophiles, although we called them ‘dirty old men’. We didn’t leave our front doors wide open all day because – believe it or not – there were these bad people called burglars. And we did not all look out for each other. In fact, we were every bit as selfish and insular as we can be today.

The sad passing of my dishwasher is hardly worthy of a funeral. It’s a pain in the arse, all right, but it has taken me back to another era when technology was a crackling, fizzing black and white telly and a radiogram (one for the kids, there) was the size of a small car. It’s become, like the washing machine and the fridge-freezer, part of my ‘how on earth did I manage without that?, a necessity. I rather like the technology that has made some humdrum activities slightly less boring. And if some bugger could come up with a dishwasher that puts all the clean items into cupboards and drawers, put me down for one.