Sunday, January 16

 

I read somewhere that an extraordinary percentage of home buyers regard a dishwasher as an absolute necessity when they are considering a prospective purchase.  I don’t suppose it’s surprising; everyone is keen to cut down on labour intensive activities and washing-up is one of the least popular household chores.

 

But does having a dishwasher stack up as a positive addition to a household?  I can only talk about the experiences of a relatively elderly two-person household and accept that things might be different for a family of 6.

 

When people reach our age, their diet changes.  No longer do we have complicated dinners which need multiple cooking utensils and mixing dishes.  We’re more likely to take something from the freezer and cook it in the plastic dish it came in.  Or we will have a toasted sandwich or bowl of soup.  A normal meal in our house might produce two dirty plates, 2 knives, 2 forks and, if I’m allowed to have a dessert, 1 dish and a spoon.  It might take three days to fill the dishwasher before we put it on; think of the dishes, covered in food residue, lying in the confines of the dishwasher for days.  Healthy?  I don’t think so.

 

Rinse the plates, before you put them in, I hear you say, but the strong recommendation from dishwasher specialists is to never rinse the plates: the dishwashing chemical attaches itself to the fragments of leftover food and that is necessary for a proper clean.  Yes, I know it sounds like balderdash but the man I heard saying this on television was wearing a white coat and had a rectangular badge on the pocket so we have to believe him.

 

Those dinner plates I mentioned are too big for the top drawer so need to be stacked in the bottom.  Do you find bending over easy nowadays?  I certainly don’t.

 

And teaspoons!  Since having a dishwasher, we’ve had to buy more teaspoons.  How many teaspoons does a two-person household need?  Apparently, lots, if you are in the habit of, each time you make a coffee, ensuring the teaspoon ends up in the dishwasher where it sits patiently waiting until the next cycle starts. And that might be three days.  Are we mad?  Does a teaspoon which has only been used to stir one or even two cups of coffee need a complex treatment of washing, sterilising and drying before it can be used again?  I try to beat the system by secreting my used teaspoon ready for another use but Marilyn always manages to find it and, with a tut, puts in into the dishwasher to make sure it has no residual germs.

 

They say that, before the gods destroy us, they will make us mad.  Hmmm!