I love you, Mrs. Stewart

Funny that this should happen right after I posted about acceptable colors to wear, but today I was wearing a color I almost NEVER wear, never ever ever – white – and I had not had it on more than two hours before something happened to remind me why I never wear it.

It was a very hot afternoon and Mr. A and I were lounging around in front of the fan, sharing a little box of anniversary mini-chocolates. The very first one I bit into was a dark chocolate truffle with (I was soon to find out) a melted dark chocolate ganache center that gushed out from between my teeth and landed in a deep brown blob all down the front of this beautiful pure white camisole I was wearing. It was only the second time I've ever worn it.

So I leaped up and went to the laundry in search of a bottle of Shout, which I applied, and then – to make short work of a potentially very long and boring story – hand washed it in a stock pot on the stove. The final step in laundering was to add a few drops of Mrs. Stewart's Bluing to the rinse water. And I don't know if it was the pre-treatment or the quick washing or the bluing or the very hot water or what, but my, is it ever White now. I still can't believe all the chocolate came out.

And I'm all giddy and excited now about bluing. Can you use it as dye, does anyone know? (I'm kind of on a dying binge right now, in case you hadn't noticed.) Laundry and all these general household tasks are sort of fascinating me right now. I've rediscovered the library and at the top of the huge stack of books I have lined up to read is this one: Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. I've only just started reading it but already I'm sort of freaking a little bit over just how much work there was to do in those houses. Even more than that, I'm in awe (and not in a good way) over how completely people of that time and place seem to have bought into the idea that you really do have to do things the way the official sources say you do.

Listen to this:

The attractive, tastefully appointed house was a sign of respectability. Taste was not something personal; instead it was something sanctioned by society. Taste, as agreed by society, had moral value, and therefore aherence to what was considered at any one time to be good taste was a virtue, while ignoring the taste of the period was a sign of something very wrong indeed. ...Conformity, conventionality, was morality.

Hmm. I was gearing up to write about how glad I am that that attitude has changed, but now that I think of it I don't suppose it has, much. People are social animals, and even though the details of what's considered okay and what isn't are always changing, it seems like a pretty universal desire of people to want to know where they stand amongst the others around them, and therefore to pay attention to those kinds of rules – whether they care to obey them or not.

Although of course there are always exceptions. I tend to like people who choose their own way, or at least to find them interesting ... up to a point. Lately I've met a few people who have really frayed the edges of my open-mindedness, and I'm finding it a little sad to feel myself wishing they would just take their aggressively weird-ass attitudes and get away from me. Maybe I've become boring in my old age.

Anyway. My hands are sore and tight and stink of bleach just from hand-washing and rinsing one tiny little piece of fabric. I can't imagine what it must have been like to have to wash an entire household's laundry that way two or three times a week.