A Story About Dishwashers

And also capitalism, the church, and breadsticks in Marmite.

That all marriages end in the kitchen is a truth universally unacknowledged and largely underappreciated. This summer, I watched as a friend completely restacked the dishwasher I’d watched their partner stack earlier. This is empirical evidence of the statement above. I have, in my pettier, and therefore obviously rare, moments, taken photographs of the damage inflicted on the middle of the butter packet, when logic dictates butter should be used from the outside in, or from one side to the other, and not scooped, laisse faire from the middle. I confess to sending these photographs to friends. Popular culture would have us believe otherwise. Because we are conditioned to be attached to notions of fidelity, it’s always the opposite that’s to blame for a marriage disintegrating; usually the nanny or the secretary, an interloper always, who’s at fault. Never the dishwasher. Never the butter packet. But it’s these micro-incompatibilities that are the problem.

That and life expectancy. Hear me out. A few years ago I researched the average duration of a marriage in the 1800s, SIX years. ‘Til death do us part meant six years. Hardly a big commitment, especially in more straightforward times, without dishwashers, with cooks (if you were lucky). But think about it, you pledge your troth to someone for six years. It makes anniversary gifts suddenly make sense. No one was getting silver or gold or diamonds or platinum; Olympic levels of achievement reserved for the Gods. Instead, they were gifting paper, cotton, fruit (not sure I believe this one), iron or sweets if they reached six; earthly things. Women died, men died, everyone died all the time and while I’m not advocating for the reduction in life expectancy, although soon no one will be able to afford to be old, there’s something to be said for reconsidering the expectations put on marriage.

I began to think about marriage when I started to think about the influence of the church. It’s rare now that I’m not thinking about this influence, but when I was redrafting The Last Days, I realised I really hadn’t thought of the wider societal influence of the church. I’d thought of it personally, and mostly through the lens of a cult, but being Scottish, I began to see the pernicious influence of the church in society in general. We are a joyless nation, ones scared of our own shadow, hardly able to acknowledge never mind express our own desires. It’s why we drink so much. It’s why we’re so depressed. I know these are sweeping generalisations, but the evidence exists to back them up. Without the church, capitalism would be impossible. The church keeps everyone in the right place and the right social order, creating a type of panopticon facilitating surveillance culture long before technology could do the same. The insistence on a proscribed set of morals creating a hierarchy of behaviour through which it was possible to other and exclude any deviants, and in calling these morals, there wasn’t a question of any other ways of living being moral, or simply good. Through the tithing system, the congregation became a useful source of capital, and as we moved towards industrialisation, the church’s moral code became a useful way of ensuring a productive, abstemious workforce. If Marx had had any sense, he’d have argued for total Dionysian abandonment.

The collision of church, capitalism and our attachment to marriage, continues to skew the economy, even in a post church country, a kind of off kilter hangover of Kinder, Kuche, Kirche. Whereas in the past, one person went to work and the other stayed at home to look after the children, having two working parents paying for the labour of at least a third in the form of childcare, ensured a profitable, gainfully employed workforce, and one too knackered to go out in the evenings and cause any sort of civic disturbance, instead they spent their leisure in municipal swimming pools and invest in more consumer products including, dishwashers.

Thing is, when the inevitable decline revolving around the dishwasher sets in, few people can afford to live alone because two earner households have stacked the economy against single people and so the theory of ‘til death do us part, proclaimed in the throes of naivety begins to look ominously like a prophetic joke. As Deborah Levy said, happy ever after depends on where you end the story.

Of course, it is wrong to blame solely the dishwasher or the butter, other behaviours might come into play. If say you’re someone who thinks there’s no greater pleasure than eating gherkins straight for the jar, leaning against the work surface at the end of a long day. The same goes for breadsticks dipped straight into butter or occasionally and horrifically, Marmite. In defiance of the many dieticians I’ve seen and sacked in my life (resistant to treatment my notes said) the best foods are the ones eaten standing up, or half at least. Oysters at the bar before dinner, bao buns from that place in China Town (no one able to remember exactly which that place is, the best buns, elusive), or sitting perched on the worksurface after a night out and a long walk home finishing bread, cheese, the dregs of the wine. This level of delight in largely forbidden pleasures of the flesh might indicate that at some point, you will be trouble. But mostly, it’s the dishwasher.

(This is the result of many months of careful interviewing and robust research. Mostly conducted in coffeeshops and kitchens across the UK, with a variety of friends. The bread, cheese, dregs of the wine, was one of the best suppers I’ve had recently, in the biting cold of a Devon night. Perhaps the pickles part is also autobiographical.)