Saturday 17 March 2012

Dishing the dirt


This year I'm doing something new. I'm sterilising my pots and trays. It's one of those things that we all know we should do...  Last time (about 10 years ago to be honest) I used Jeyes's Fluid  -and boy did it STINK.  A truly horrible experience. Never again.  This time I've filled the trug with a solution of Milton Sterilising Fluid. This is what is used for sterilising baby feeding equipment. I recall spilling some on my clothes and it bleached them good. The smell is more like a public swimming pool, much better than the tar like smell of Jeye's. Everything gets a soak of a few hours in the trug and then a good scrub with that brush before being dried off. That should remove any dirt!

For anyone who thinks this is a boring topic...  I have to agree. But boring can be the basis for all the excitement that follows.

I can't resist mentioning a reference to dirt that amuses me. Residents of the town of Wick in northern Scotland  are proud to be known as "Dirty Wickers". Adopting the local parlance the Wick Heritage Centre proudly sells "Dirty Weeeker" T-shirts  Why?  First of all you have to be aware that the linguistic  heritage in this area is more Norse than Scots or Anglo Saxon. The word "Dirdie" means (or used to mean)  busy, industrious, hard working. Wick had a justifiable reputation as a centre of industry during the herring boom which thrived 100 years ago. A "dirdie" Wicker was a "true"  Wicker and proud to be so. Times have changed but the language has yet to catch up!

4 comments:

  1. Peronally I love the smell of Jeyes...but I love the smell of Milton too!!

    Have to admit to never having cleaned up my boxes but if I go with your numbers seeing how I only started up 4 years ago I still have a few years before the necessity arises!!

    Thanks for the little history lesson...it's fun to learn the origin of little phrases so that they make sense.

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  2. I haven't cleaned mine yet either - is it following the same logic as rotating crops because I wouldn't have thought they did it way back in the when-when's.

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  3. Oh dear - we don't clean ours either! Now you're showing us all up!

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  4. Know I should do but don't (yet), well done for doing the right way!

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