Jamie Stokes: Sunday Traditions
It was an ordinary Sunday in Krakow. Sundays are days for tradition – tiny little festivals at the end of every week. Even the Stokes household has Sunday traditions, though I often wonder how similar or dissimilar they are to the traditions being carried out among our neighbours.
Sunday tradition number one is cleaning and maintenance. The normal progress of life stops on Sundays, like a train temporarily lifted from the tracks. This makes it the ideal, and usually the only, time to make adjustments to the wheels and to oil the bogies. In reality, this usually means cleaning things (clothes, bathtubs, floors) so that we can make them dirty again before the next Sunday.
Cleaning is traditionally women's work, unless the thing being cleaned has an engine or ammunition. I don't know about Polish women in general, but my wife has a particular fascination with cleaning curtains and windows. In theory, cleaning curtains offers limited scope for disaster, but she managed to find some. The thing about curtains is that they have walls behind them. If you had asked me last week whether walls were one of the things women should clean, I probably would have said yes. I would have been wrong.
Cleaning a wall seems simple enough – it's a large flat surface, not unlike a table, but vertical. However, it turns out that attempting to clean a wall in the same way you might clean a table, doesn't work. All it does is take the small patch of dirt you found behind the curtains and spread it in big swirly shapes across the rest of the wall. Although I quite liked the decorative effect, this was not a satisfactory result for a woman in a cleaning mood.
After a couple of hours of spreading the wall dirt around in ever-more interesting configurations, there were tears of frustration and a growing sense on my part that I was going to have to get involved. I was informed that painting walls which have been cleaned ineffectively is man's work. I assume this is because it is basically simple and may involve the use of a screwdriver.
Perhaps I've lived in Poland too long and become infected with the Polish gene for revolution. I rebelled, largely because my own Sunday plan was to cook beef stew (a very thick English soup) and I had been looking forward to it all week. My wife knew better than to try and argue with any of my intentions that involve my stomach. For just one day, we decided to fight the forces of tradition.
A few hours and one trip to Castorama later, the revolution was in full swing. I was in the kitchen chopping vegetables and my wife was next door painting the offending wall. If Lech Wałęsa could have seen us, he would have had a heart attack. The fact that it was Sunday just added to the thrill.
Like many revolutions, however, ours floundered when it came to the detail. We discovered that my wife can paint a wall on a Sunday without the universe coming to an end, but what she can’t do is finish painting a wall on a Sunday. Once the part with the dirty swirls had been covered satisfactorily, she lost interest in minor details such as painting the rest of the wall, and particularly in painting straight lines along the edges of the wall.
c Oddly, while she cannot live in a flat with the smallest speck of dirt on the windows, she has no problem living with a wall that has only been 75 percent painted. I, on the other hand, could happily live with windows that were impossible to see through, but would rather be on fire than have to look at a wall with poorly-painted edges. I solemnly handed over the kitchen knife, and she equally solemnly handed me the paint brush. We know our places.
Jamie Stokes