True Confession : My dirty little idiosyncrasy

One of my little idiosyncrasies. Most people in Australia, who live in single family dwellings, have a clothes line. Some apartment blocks have a shared line, also. There are few days in the year when the weather is too ghastly to dry clothes outside, especially in Queensland, the Sunshine State!

This is where my idiosyncrasy comes into play, though some might tag it by its possible clinical term as an “obsessive, compulsive” habit ritual.

When I peg the clothes out, the coloured, plastic pegs chosen for each item must match. Two yellow pegs, or two green pegs; at all possible costs it must never be a yellow peg with a green peg.

Oh, and my clothing needs to have blue pegs. Blue is my favourite colour, most of my clothing is blue (or black, a little grey in winter). So it follows that the blue pegs are for moi.

Mr FD, uncouth and uncivilised, (be they of the same literal meaning?) follows no such gentility and will now only use random colours, but [name and shame] he deigns to even peg a pair of undies with a shirt. Yes, dear reader, a shirt will be pegged, not from the hem line, but from its shoulders and will frequently have a pair of undies dangling from a shared should peg. I only than the Big Whatever that our clothes line is at the back of our property and unseen by other eyes, except for wallabies and kangaroos who disdain the wearing of underwear anyway.

Yet, this attention to detail does not carry through to other areas of my life. My children have entertained dinner guests with the many and varied uses their mother has found for a tupperware lettuce crisper. Why limit it to just holding a lettuce, I say? Great for holding left over roast, for instance. And small, bouncing balls; or cotton wool. I wonder if I could set jelly in one?

Just this weekend I horrified Daughter 2 by informing her that I carried my fruit salad to school in a tupperware sandwich keeper. It doesn’t leak for a start. Why is everything a”keeper” with tupperware? Are they worried we might lose our sandwiches on the way to lunch?

I speak of tupperware though I have been but to two parties in my life. Most of my tupperware has been inherited from my mother who could never say no to anyone inviting her to yet another party plan event.

Do you think there are secret meetings of tupperware addicts, who meet in church basements under cover of darkness? “Hello, my name is Darleen, and I have 42 tupperware lettuce crispers.” Too frightening to contemplate.