literally another aussie in london

the cleaner

For the second time in my life I live in a place with a cleaner.

For the first time in my life I am generally around when the cleaner is here.

There is a special kind of guilt attached to being a working class boy with a cleaner.

It’s not as if she is here all the time, it’s only once a week for 3 hours, but for those 3 hours I usually seem to be here and I don’t think I’ll ever be all that comfortable with it.

I can handle people cleaning around me, my mum is anal retentive, and my father thinks more than a paper on a desk is clutter, so I am used to that.

It is the paying of the woman to come to my house and clean for me that bothers me.

I can try and explain it to myself intellectually, she needs the money, and I am helping her out.

But emotionally it just hurts a little; in a small way I have a servant, not a maid, but someone who walks around the house picking shit up off the floor and wiping up my utter filth.

What makes it worse is she is a lovely woman, I wouldn’t mind a shocking bitch cleaning my toilet, but a friendly polish woman doing it, does bother me a little.

She is also extremely entertaining.

I have never met a more jittery person in all my life; even if she knows you are in the house, if you enter the room she jumps and gasp every fucking time.

Sometimes I have to resist the urge to creep up behind her and yell, although I have on occasion entered a room with stealth and then called out her name just to watch her jump.

When I told her about the burglary she was afraid to be left in the home alone, although almost as afraid to be left in the home with me, or anyone else for that matter.

She also calls me Jerry, every time, even though my name has been written down for her, and I have spelt it out.

We often have long conversations where she understands not a word of my Australian English, and I understand one in three of her Polish words.

Every time I am here she asks me a question, sometimes her 3 hours in the house is not enough time for me to answer it in a way she will understand, but that has never stopped her asking them.

It always starts the same way, “Um Jerry, how you say”….

I know this means I want be working much over the next few hours.

One of her other great traits is not speaking when the guide is in the house. We are not sure if she has a problem with women, dark women, or curly hair, but she only speaks to me, which helps neither of us.

My favourite part of her visit is this though.

Putting the egg rings on the china hen.

May 18, 2009 - Posted by Jrod | living in london | accents, china hen, cleaner, polish