This weekend I am alone in the flat. As a result I have decided to do the whole middle-class thing, my definition of which may astound and scare you. Having told the cleaner not to come (this is not too difficult, my cleaner is an entirely imaginary construct through which I imagine what my rooms would look like if I ever bothered to prioritise cleaning above run-on sentences), I have ordered an enormous amount of cleaning product, fresh vegetables and toiletries, so that I may finally elevate my rooms above the hovel they have become and indulge in some pissing about with healthier food.
You may be thinking ‘get a fucking car’ and ‘get on with it then’, but first allow me the ultimate Middle Class indulgence: to tell everyone about what I am doing, until you get bored and feel you must interject with your own meaningless story. The comments section is below, and I encourage you to use it.
“I’m on the train’ – a sentence as useless as it is energetically efficient, is often maligned by the chattering classes as evidence as a brash middleclassness, but picture if you can the utter catastrophe of the man in the restaurant with his wife answering the phone at the table, then detailing to whomever it might be – the NAMA inspector, the IMF, his Mistress or an interviewer from the Daily Mail, or, more likely his real wife, exactly what he had ordered.
My second indulgence is the delight of proper espresso brewed in a plastic tube with a plunger which cost something like €60. The coffee is delicious, and the Aeropress is a delightful invention. It is delightful in the most middle class way possible – it allows the owner to go on and on about it to anyone foolish enough to ask about it, and who wasn’t middle-class enough to bugger about in the Gadget Store searching for baubles and trinkets to make their life more profoundly meaningless. And it makes a bloody good espresso, as it happens.
The third indulgence is, of course, a supermarket being so kind as to deliver everything. In my experience, the first question anyone asks of the delivery-shopper like myself is ‘how much does it cost?’ This allows a middle class person to brush off the cost of the delivery as a matter of no importance, in order to establish with the questioner how it’s much more important to protect the quality time of the weekend.
Fourth on the list is the delight of bathing in something obviously unsuited to the task. A shower gelee (gelee, mind you) with added white clay. Some of you may have enjoyed, as I did, playing in clay pits as a child, and not once did our mothers praise our decision to get covered in the viscous muck. Nonetheless, the cognoscenti can buy the product at a reduced rate (how we middle class Apple users appreciate a good bargain) since it is eschewed by the rest of the purchasing public. More fool them. I shall let you know how it gets on.
After that I shall liberally and unnecessarily apply cologne priced 75,000% higher than its equivalent quantity of milk, and about 75 times more likely to give me some illness. But I shall smell of whatever Kenzo want me to smell of this season, and that is a victory in itself.
Then there are sugar snap peas to be eaten (the cheap ones are always better), asparagus to be charred (unfortunately, the more expensive ones are always better) and spinach to be tossed, grapes to be engorged on, candles to be lit and world events to be disapproved of.
It should then be about 2pm, upon which time I intend to use more chemicals in my bathroom than safe or sensible before finally attacking various blogs with my brand of wit and wisdom.
