Our old hoover had a fitting called a crevice tool. The new one does not. I asked educated, intelligent people about the office about the crevice tool and it's place in national, nay European life and all I got was a lot of silly sniggering. You despair sometimes, don't you?
Novelist Anne Enright is similarly concerned about attachments for hoovers and their relative importance to a happy life. A few weeks ago, Anne confessed the sensuous pleasure that ironing gives her. This week, she's in 'hoover heaven'. She looked back wistfully to the 1950s where housewives in ads always looked pristine and even wore their ball gowns to hoover. She's named this mythical woman, 'Felicity':
"This is a woman who never wrestled with the psycho-hose-beast that is my vacuum cleaner. She never had to chase it, as it sucked up pins, paper clips, love notes, vital receipts, small pets. She never had to drag it away as it choked on curtains or whined to melt-down, in a tug-of-love with a small yellow check cushion."
Anne ponders the meaning of the attachments - do you know what any of them are for? Why do we hoover in the first place? The answer, of course, is that demon known as dust - something that has always caused anxiety, especially among women.
"Believe it or not, they used to say that dust caused TB. A less than perfect housewife was actively trying to slaughter her children. Now, she is trying to give them asthma. She is doing this deliberately."
Despite all this worry, Anne argues that there's something immensely satisfying about hoovering - it sounds like a pneumatic drill and is very "moral". There is such simple pleasure in a clean room - an unclean room means feelings of guilt.
