Feral Scale
My View - Wednesday 27th May 2020 

Its half term apparently. I received this news on Sunday night, just after my husband revealed he wouldn’t be going to work the following day with it being a bank holiday Monday. That was also news. I stopped checking the kitchen calendar in March, when I realised anything vaguely important like work or GCSEs had been sidelined along with fun stuff like holidays, gigs and soirees.  

I now have a completely different system of measuring the passage of time. It’s a more basic approach focusing on hair growth, hygiene and general attitude to housekeeping. I’ve done away with days, weeks and months, replacing them instead with a sliding feral scale. Stage one (lets call that February) saw me with a neat coiffure, freshly cleansed skin and a relatively organised cutlery drawer. I am now at the tail end of stage four and in serious danger of falling of the centile. 

My legs are enjoying a new-found freedom beneath what appears to be a pelt of sun-bleached hessian threads. Not since the baby years has this relaxed stance on depilation been deployed. Armpits et al are running amok with gay abandon, leaving no trace of previously curated order. A whole plantation is snaking its way to the surface, protected by the canopy of comfy clothes. I am loving it. It feels like my inner hippy has stepped out of the wings and into the sunshine. I’ve kicked off my stilettoes and slipped on some cotton socks.  

I stopped using shower gel after reading an article about the joy of soap. One bar lasts at least four weeks in our house because I still can’t convert the family. The downside is the lingering essence not dissimilar to my mother’s dining room following one of her whist drives. Soap manufacturers left the eye-stinging mint and candy cupcake fragrances to the new suds on the block, so stage two of my new scale was marked by the aroma of lavender, three with sweet pea and now I’m down to the last nub of coal tar. I might as well abandon my pyjamas for a wynciette nightie. 

Sadly, I haven’t maintained a wartime approach to housework. It was only a year ago when I went the full Mari-Kondo and streamlined our terrace from top to bottom, thrice-folding vest tops and thanking old trainers. But ironically, now I’ve got more time to compartmentalize, I can’t be fussed so my tea towels and shoe polish dusters have been reunited.  

This relaxed approach feels right at the moment though. If I’m not going to be breaking out the bikini any time soon, the follicles may as well roam free. Until hairdressers are back in business, I’ll stick with clever lighting and hats on zoom meetings; and since nobody is allowed in my house, there seems little point in dusting. Mother Nature is having her moment, and only when the back-to-office claxon sounds will I resume my unnatural practices. 

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