446. Weird text and dirty shoes

 I am frustrated and unhappy when I come home from yet an other of these meetings (to think I used to enjoy them) so I need to do something useful and practical. So I head into my son's bedroom and decide that I should really stop using it as a room-for-every-purpose and leave it clean and tidy for my son when he comes home. That would make sense. Rather than carting things in and out the rooms and up and down the stairs: printers, sewing machines, clothes racks, ironing boards and school books.  

So I go in there as if going into a battle then cannot be lost. And I am almost finished when I notice a plastic bag and for some reason that plastic bag looks quite suspicious to me. I approach it slowly, peer inside it and wow step back and run away in horror!

Inside the bag are the shoes my son wore in the last match where his team won 65 to 25 and is he keeping them dirty as a kind of lucky charm? I mean he used to have a lucky top I was not allowed to wash. But that was years ago, he was a kid now he is an adult. OK a young adult but still ...

I grab the bag, take a plastic bowl and put the boots in it. I cover them with a thick layer of that weird pink paste that the girls bought months ago and that Miss Muddy Boots used to wash her rucksack after two years of traveling across three continents. It it cleaned her bag it is going to clean these boots.

I watch the shoes (he even brought back turf from the pitch, still clinging to the soles) and think maybe add a special ingredient. Miss Buddy Boots used a brush to scrub but I am not doing any scrubbing here. I think maybe a few drops of bleach will do the trick. The smell is ok it will just be like he's gone swimming after the game, with his boots on. Dirty boots on.

While I am at work the next day watching the teenagers (pretending to be) reading what they described as my 'weird' and 'unsettling' (I gave the student who knew this word dithyrambic praise, for one word, not even in a sentence - that's how desperate I am) text my mind suddenly wanders back home, to the bathroom on the first floor, to the plastic bowl in the bath, to the shoes in it. OH NO! I gasp. The kids do not seem to notice, my text has sent them to sleep. The bleach, the pink paste (who knows what this paste is, it says 100% natural but it is Barbie pink so can't be that natural, the bleach and the paste and the turf in the same bowl. What kind of chemical reaction have I caused? And if no explosion, nor foaming, nor hissing may be the shoes are disintegrating right now while I am doing this stupid text. And after the shoes, it will be my plastic bowl and then maybe the bath itself! And who knows? The floor too. That was laziness that caused that and now it is going to cost me a lot of money. 

'Class dismissed.' I yell and as they pack their stuff and go out I a certain they think I aim weird and that's why I give weird texts. Bummer of a day.

P.S. The weird text is the opening paragraphs of Stop the Machine by E. M. Forster