Hello, you sentient balls of Stardust.
This is the struggle care podcast, the podcast that wants to help you take care of yourself,
even when life is hard.
I'm your host, Casey Davis.
And today I'm talking to one of my favorite TikTok creators, Anne Russell, Anne, say hello.
Hello, I'm pleased to be here.
I am so glad you're here.
So Anne Russell, if you guys don't know Anne Russell, she has a bigger following on TikTok
than I do, which I noticed this morning.
You've got 1.9 million followers on TikTok, which is incredible.
You're also an author, your book, How to Clean Everything, a practical down-to-earth guide
for anyone who doesn't know where to start.
And when is the release date for this book?
First of September, I think we're aiming for young fledglings going off to university,
young people leaving the nest for the first time when they've finally graduated.
And I think that's the aim.
Love it.
So first of September is your UK date, and is there a US release date?
There is.
I believe it's in January.
I think it's something odd like the 9th of January.
I keep looking, but it changed at one point.
I think it was the 7th of January, but yeah, January.
Okay.
So I recently bought my first housekeeping book because I thought, well, you know, I
used some information and I can't even remember the title of it.
But it was like one of the most popular ones, at least in the US.
And I get like a couple of paragraphs into the introduction.
And all I could think was like, I can never recommend this book to any of my followers.
Because she starts off and she's kind of like waxing poetic about like the beauties
of housekeeping.
And like she just kind of turns it into a very like, as I stepped into my femininity,
and I was like, it's just, it's everything that I try to strip away from care tasks and
my content, you know, like, okay, they're just functional.
Like they have nothing to do with you as a person.
So that's one of the reasons I can't wait to see your book.
No, I mean, I have always said that the only thing that a spotless house tells you is
that somebody has a spotless house.
There's no moral value to cleanliness whatsoever.
Some people value it very highly.
And that's fine.
Other people really don't care.
And as long as they can, my only slight caveat to that was if you do start, you know, storing
your wee in bottles, go to a doctor because they can help with that.
That's probably stepping over into something that needs proper help.
But you know what?
I mean, as long as you deserve to feel safe in your own home and part of feeling safe
is not feeling judged on standards that you don't find important.
Some people don't find reading important and don't ever read.
Some people don't find cleaning important and don't ever clean.
And that's fine.
I like when you said, you know, you deserve a safe environment.
And I feel like that's kind of where it starts.
Like you deserve a safe environment.
You deserve a sanitary environment.
You deserve a functional environment.
And if that's hard for you, you deserve compassionate and nonjudgmental help.
And speaking of nonjudgmental, I think the reason why your account blew up is because
you're one of the few sort of cleaning accounts that doesn't bring all of this kind of perfectionism
and snootiness and judgment into cleaning.
And so I'm just curious, like, well, first of all, why do you know how to clean everything?
Let's start there.
I have done it for my main source of income for nearly 20 years.
So a lot of it I learned on the job.
And that's it.
A lot of it is also basic chemistry in common sense.
But that's how I know how to do it.
And you really know how to do it.
Like I'm so impressed.
I was going through some of your tech talks today because when people ask you questions
about how to clean things, it's not just what I consider like the basics.
I mean, I wrote down so like you have tech talks on how to clean smoke off of walls,
how to get super glue out of car seats, how to get ink off of air pods, spray paint out
of quilts, and my favorite bike tire marks off of a wall.
It's like there's nothing that you don't know how to clean.
Well, the thing is, it's all the same.
It's exactly the same.
All cleaning.
Every single step of it is the same thing.
You have to find a solvent to remove the stain that doesn't damage the thing that the stain
is on.
And when you've solved two of those, you've got it.
Not all stains can be removed.
It is very possible that some things dies are not made to be removed.
They are by their nature designed to be permanent.
So some things can't be removed.
But other than that, if you can find out what dissolves the thing that you've spilt, and
as long as it doesn't damage the thing that it's on, you should be able to get it out.
Sometimes you come and whatever.
But at least if you work that one, you think, okay, start with the super glue.
What dissolves super glue?
Acetone.
It's on fabric.
If it won't damage the fabric.
I do put caveats to that because it's very volatile and it needs to soak and it can be
quite hard to get the acetone to non-evaporate before you remove the super glue because
it goes like that.
But it's all the same.
It's exactly the same thing from start to finish.
Know what you've got.
Know what removes it from the thing that it's on.
And if it damages the surface, it's on.
You've got to work out what's more important.
The surface or the stain?
Well, I love that there really is quite a bit of skill and knowledge that goes into
cleaning.
And I love that for two reasons.
One, I think that a lot of us, particularly women or those that were socialized as women,
somehow got the message that the ability to clean and do other care tasks is some sort
of innate thing we should possess.
And so we feel guilty or ashamed if we're not good housekeepers, if we don't know how
to clean something.
And I think when we put it up as there's real skill and knowledge.
So if you didn't grow up with a caretaker that taught you how to do those things, and
I think sometimes there's almost that extra shame on top of it.
It's not just, I don't know how to clean my AC filter.
And if I ask for help or if I let anyone know, I'm also sort of tipping my hand to the fact
that like, I didn't have anyone show me this.
I'm lacking in this, you know, area.
I'm not a valid adult.
And I find you so comforting because one of the things I noticed is that you're one of
the few cleaning accounts where people aren't just asking like, hey, how do I get grass stains
out of pants?
How do we get this?
But people are so used to you being a non judgmental space that you're one of the few places that
people will come and say, I've got maggots.
How do I get rid of them?
Right?
Like I've got smoke.
How do I get rid of them?
I've got fruit flies, urine stains, mold, like how do I get rid of these things?
And I'm just, I'm kind of curious, like your thoughts on, I know, so there's a lot of cleaning
accounts on TikTok and sort of affectionately referred to as clean talk.
Why is it you think that your account is the one that seems to be a safe place for people
to ask those questions?
I think I try and set the bar not at all.
As far as I'm concerned, there are no, okay, there are some bad questions.
There are some really icky questions and there's nothing to do with cleaning.
There are some invasive and unpleasant questions that humans ask, are the humans that are
horrible.
Something asking how to do something, if you don't know something, you don't know it.
So how are you going to find out if you don't ask?
I went to boarding school.
I learned a fair bit weirdly.
My main thing was cooking many years ago was cooking because one of my aunts had been
a professional cook, housekeeper all her life so she could cook.
And my grandmother was very judgmental and would hump around my bedroom, telling me,
I don't know, I'm a dog tired.
You could do this to me.
I would be crying while she tidied up and I couldn't do it.
I didn't understand how she did it.
And then I went to boarding school.
And when I first left boarding school, I remember standing in a bed set and I had dirty dishes
and at the time you had to put money into a meter and you had a little gas heater that
you've, and I couldn't get glasses to be not sticky.
And of course, now I'm older.
I needed rubber gloves and hot water, but I couldn't work out how to do it.
I didn't understand what I was doing wrong.
And there was no one to ask so I threw them away.
And now I do know how.
Now I've learnt this stuff.
I figure other people deserve to know if they don't ask.
I'm literally like, I don't know what it was that really hit me, but I was tearing up
when you said if people don't know something, then they don't know something with, and that
doesn't mean anything.
And I think so many of us for different reasons have internalized this message that if I don't
know something, that is something to be embarrassed about that reveals a lack of something in
me.
And I remember from a young girl, my mom always tells stories about this.
I didn't want to do anything I didn't already know how to do.
And I remember really specifically sort of looking around early in my life and feeling
like I must have just gone to the bathroom when God was like handing out directions on
how to do life to everyone because it seemed like everyone else knew how to do things and
I didn't.
And I was gifted in some ways.
So there were things that I intuitively was very good at.
But I think sometimes the downside to that is if I wasn't automatically good at something,
if I couldn't automatically into it something, I felt like that was too vulnerable to explore.
I either had to know how to do it or I was not going to do it at all.
And I think that there's something really powerful about taking what a lot of people
consider to be, well, you should just know this and kind of making it a safe space to
go.
I mean, maybe, but maybe not.
And like at the end of the day, you don't know what you don't know.
And there's nothing wrong with not knowing.
In fact, there is always a certain I think it's very much put on women is that they should
be good at things, competent at things.
You should have great hair.
You should be well dressed.
You should be good looking.
You should have good hands.
Your food should be amazing.
You have these list of bars that you're expected to meet and not only are you expected to
meet them, you are expected to care about them.
And a lot of it, I think, is predicated on the idea that you should be this fictional
being that we've all heard of.
And of course, with television and magazines, we have all seen, you know, in the Victorians
had it, you know, the perfect mother, you know, with a cool hand gone with a wind.
If you think Scarlett O'Hara, who was a poisonous woman, her mother was this perfect woman with
cool hands, this icon of perfection.
It's a trope that comes up through all sorts of literature.
And when we can't measure it, we feel inferior, we feel wrong.
And it makes it hard to learn life skills and domestic tasks because I feel like, you
know, okay, I want to learn the law or I want to learn chemistry.
I want to learn AVs things.
And it's like, okay, I'll go to school and learn it.
But like, knowing chemistry versus not knowing chemistry doesn't have anything to do with
your being or your worthiness or your ability to adult.
But what I find is just like that housekeeping book that I got so much sort of basic care
task knowledge is really bound up in this like romantic story of identity, right?
Like you see women who sometimes post online about their homemakers, their stay-at-home
parents, they like to bake, they like to do this, which here's the thing, like cool, like
those are cool things to like.
But they can't just come out and say like, I like baking bread, here's how you bake bread.
It has to be like, I was meandering through the woods barefoot, really thinking about
my femininity and my place in the family.
And little, you know, Jerry was next to me and just thinking about what it means to be
a mother and to be hospitable and to make a home.
And it's like everything has to be all wrapped up in this like, I don't even know.
It makes you feel like a terrible parent.
You know, it's interesting.
My children, I mean, I have four children, they're all adult now.
They kind of remember things from their childhood that I don't really remember.
And I mean, some of their childhood was distinctly rakety and chaotic.
But it's interesting that some of the things that they remember are times when I just kind
of threw the rules out that my son was quite young.
He was a little oddball and he had a birthday party.
10 or 12 of his kids came around middle of the summer, hot day.
And I, you know, it was about 30 years ago, you know, bowls of crisps and cake and stuff.
And we were going to play party games.
And even then that they had quite a lot more money.
So they were used to like bouncy castles and plums and there was me with a bowl of crisps.
And they were all kind of, you know, how they do.
And I think he must have been about eight.
And in the end, I just thought, I don't know what to do with these kids.
And it was a lovely summer's day and out the back, we had a field.
So I took them up into the field, waved a five pound note and said, the first person
who can catch a cricket gets a fiver.
And that was it for an hour.
They run around the field trying to catch crickets, which is actually really quite difficult
unless you know, you're quite slow and patient.
And then we all trooped back in, nobody having caught a trip.
And I said food.
And in the end, I just looked at them and they're just kind of drooped again.
So I threw a bowl of crisps at one of them and said, food fight and left.
And just left them in, just left them in the front room, hurling crisps at each other.
It was fine.
I let the dog in.
It was, you know, it took half an hour to clear up.
They had a really nice time.
And all of them remembered it the next week as being a really good party because they'd
been allowed to do something that they weren't allowed to do.
They were allowed to do something that was forbidden.
I don't think any of the mothers ever spoke to me again.
But they had a nice time and my son remembers it.
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And you know what comes to my mind is like, okay, let's say that that's the day that
I've had as a mother, right?
Because you know, oh, I wanted them to have fun.
They had fun.
And then I go in and everyone goes home and I notice that there's like a maybe a grease
stain, right, on one of the couch cushions.
And I'm going, okay, well, I want to know how to get that out.
And I think it's really nice what you've done with both your account and what I can
only imagine with your book, which is offer this like morally neutral, non-judgmental
space to go, how do I learn how to get, you know, grease out of a couch cushion from
a place that isn't coming from almost like a better homes and gardens, which is a really
popular magazine we have here, right?
Where it's like someone has to be muse about how important it is to keep your cushions
clean.
It's like, can we just, you know, it reminds me of like when you try to get a recipe and
there's like a whole blog before you get to the recipe, that's kind of how a lot of
cleaning information is like it's buried in these like, what makes a house a home?
Like it's like, just tell me how to get the grease out.
Yeah.
What makes a house a home is not a perfect home.
I think probably you like me.
I was made to feel horrible because I couldn't keep tidy.
It made me feel small and upset and that nobody wanted me and my kids didn't care about grease
on the sofa or the cat sleeping on their pillow.
What they cared about were completely different things and if I had concentrated on keeping
my home perfect, they would not have been able to do the things that they cared about.
So it was the choice of one or the other and I knew that if I had enforced cleanliness on
them, they would have been miserable and unhappy and I didn't want to do that.
And so I really didn't.
But I did learn how to get the worst marks out of things because obviously, you know,
it's something I remember saying when they were quite small, when they would come home
covered in mud would be, oh my God, look at the state of the room.
So that's why they invented soap powder, washing powder to get mud out of clothes.
That's why we have washing powder.
If it gets marks out for a reason because people make marks and like you said, it's morally
neutral.
It doesn't matter.
So you mentioned earlier that when it comes to cleaning, there are no bad questions.
But there are certainly bad questions people ask online.
And one of the things that comes up on your account that I've noticed is people who will
try to belittle or put you down because your profession is a professional cleaner.
And I think that you have the most refreshing response to that.
And so what do you tell people when they try to sort of push back and say that, well,
that's not a real career or, you know, we can't listen to you because that job is somehow
beneath these other jobs.
I am in a position of enormous privilege because I do have a degree.
So I'm quite happy to wave a piece of paper and go, well, there is that.
But actually, I'm online.
You're asking me questions.
No job.
Every single job matters.
When the pandemic happened, we needed truck drivers.
We needed cleaners.
We needed people to pick up the rubbish.
We did not need hedge fund managers.
We did not need a lot of professions that people are taught to.
I mean, we kind of needed judges and barristers.
But realistically speaking, when the shit hits the fan, you need surgeons cannot operate
if they do not have a clean operating theater.
They cannot manage without porters to lift patients onto trolleys and move them.
Every job is valuable and should be treated with dignity.
And if you can do a job and do it with an amount of professionalism and pride and do
it well and it puts food on the table and it keeps a roof over your head, you should
be incredibly proud of the fact that you've done those things, especially against all
the odds.
I love that about you, Anne.
I love that you and like you said, there's an incredible amount of skill and knowledge
that goes into your ability to know how to clean all of these things.
And I appreciate that you have this sense of, I mean, and you said pride, but it's honestly
more of just a steadiness of, yes, this is my profession.
I work really hard at it.
I have an incredible amount of knowledge and skill and it is useful and necessary.
And what I really admire about you is the ability to do that and also be able to say
the cleaning itself is morally neutral.
Absolutely, because it is, it is the least thing.
The basics of cleaning are so simple, most things.
And I've watched you do it when you're showing people do your, you know, put a timer tidy
up in 15 minutes.
You have a cloth, a cloth with hot soapy water.
And that gets rid of most things.
It shouldn't be a big complicated affair.
It should be simple and freeing if something is bothering you.
People get, you can walk into homes of people who are chronically depressed and they can
be really quite grotty.
But a lot of the reason that they're grotty isn't that they are too depressed to do cleaning.
They are unable to think their way through cleaning all of it.
It's such a big job.
And if you allow the majority of keeping things clean is actually a simple process that doesn't
need to take hours of your time.
It doesn't need to cost a lot of money that most people can keep most places reasonably
clean and hygienic in a few, a small space of time before they go to work and a little
bit of time when they go home and keep it manageable.
Then people are less likely to get into that state because they feel that they can cope
with it.
And if you can cope with something, you can do something.
If you haven't a messy room, if you put away one tin can more than you get out every single
day, eventually your space will be clear.
It just takes longer than if you did it all at once.
But you don't have to do it all at once.
Well, and it seems so connected to most of the spaces, whether it's print, magazine,
books, online, that sort of make care tasks their main subject matter or content.
I'm thinking over here we have HGTV.
We have the Fixer Upper shows.
We have the books on house cleaning, sort of like that.
I think that because what dominates those spaces are these perfectly tidy houses and
these beautifully decorated living rooms.
And the man or the woman and their crisp clean clothes with their hair done perfectly, sort
of the Martha Stewart atmosphere.
And I think that that being the main representation of, hey, here's how we could go and learn
how to do care tasks and care for ourselves.
It's almost like it becomes its own ethos instead of just information so that you can
be comfortable and live your life.
And so it makes sense why someone's looking at their messy room and going, well, if I
can't turn it into that, if I can't turn it into like what a Pinterest board says,
a clean, nice room from a real adult should look like, what's the point of even putting
one tin can away?
I mean, of course, you also have to look at it this way, capitalism.
If you, this is aspirational, but actually what they're trying to do is make you spend
money on things that you don't need.
I mean, let's be honest here.
You know, I mean, you can see there behind me is an address with old China on it.
None of that is necessary to my, I mean, I happen to like it.
I never clean it.
It's thick with dust.
But we are all treated as consumers and we are taught from a very young age that consumption
is a morally good thing to do.
And we are taught that from quite young.
So we see these aspirational shows and you go out and you buy the cushion covers, you
buy the throw, you buy the incredibly expensive, beautiful ornate sofa that you've seen, forgetting,
of course, that you have three ginger cats and it's green and it's not going to last
because you buy that and then you feel a failure and you're taught that to make feel
better, you go and buy more stuff, you buy scented disinfectants and wonderful sprays
and bombs and you end up with this huge vat of things and no clue what you're doing.
No clue.
And all you know is that you are a failure because you have done all these things that
you believed would give you this temple of perfection.
And all it's done is make you broke and feel pretty useless and none of that stuff has
got anything whatsoever to do with having a sanitary clean and functional home.
It's sort of a timely recording because I went to a target.
Do you know about Target?
Do you all have Target in the UK?
We do not have Target in the UK.
That's probably a good thing.
Sad.
I went to Target this morning and I needed socks and hair ties for my kids.
But of course I found myself in the vacuum cleaner aisle.
I own two vacuums.
Three.
I own a robot vacuum, a mop vac, and then an old shark vacuum that just vacuums.
And I'm looking at the vacuum cleaners and I swear I came so close to buying one because
like it promised that it had this like one extra function and would do like two degrees
better than the other ones.
And I really had this moment of like Casey Davis.
This is madness.
I'm not purchased.
This is how you end up with stuff.
Like you cannot purchase another vacuum cleaner.
But it does.
It's this promise of it'll be easy.
It'll be better.
It'll be.
And I did.
I'm really proud of myself for walking away without buying a fourth vacuum cleaner.
But no, you're right.
I mean, it is certainly and what I've noticed is that it's fun to watch, you know, videos
of people cleaning things from top to bottom.
It's fun to watch home decorating shows and things like that.
But I think the mistake that a lot of us make is that we're watching this really aesthetically
pleasing visual and consuming that visual via our eyeballs gives us a good feeling.
Right?
Like even like I look at a picture of the beach and I'm like, wow, like it gives me a good
feeling to watch something like that.
And I think the mistake that we make is then going, okay, if watching this makes me feel
this way, then if I could figure out how to make my home look like that all the time,
then I would always feel this way.
That's not actually true.
No, it's not actually true.
And it's like the other one that we are sold that ties into it as much is that most people
don't have enough money.
The majority of people, you know, just the way of our society goes that some people have
an awful lot of money and a lot of things.
And some people have very little.
I am quite privileged in that I know people who have lots of money and I know people who
have nothing.
And I know from my own personal knowledge that just because you have lots of money, you
are not necessarily a happier person, your life.
Sure, if you've got lots of money, while the bad things of life are happening to you,
you are not also worrying about having enough to eat and having a roof over your head,
which is great, but it doesn't protect you from the real problems that life throws at
you, the curveballs, the illnesses, the deaths, all of those things, they happen to everybody.
And neither does having a perfect home protect you from any of the really bad things that
happens to humans.
It's so unimportant.
Like you said, your breadcrumbed into thinking that if you have this, your life will be, you
know, wonderful, you will feel great.
Your children will love you and they'll top screaming at you and you won't have this
little infested, knit-ridden, grot demon who's biting your fingers because all you're trying
to do is render some small portion of them slightly cleaner.
You know what?
That happens to people who've got millions still have small, sticky, grot demons that
they have to put in water to render clean and they still bite.
And it's such an unfair trap for, I think, women in particular because the visual that
we're sold about what success means as an adult to have a home is the amount of labor
and money that it actually takes to have and maintain a home that looks like a magazine
cover, you would either have to have enough money to pay someone to do that 24-7 or you
would have to have nothing else going on in your life.
And so to sort of sell us this idea that this is what success means, this is what legitimate
adulthood is, this is what good parenting or being a good spouse or a good woman looks
like.
And then for there to actually be no way to pull that off unless you have tons of money
and still live some sort of meaningful life is like such a jerk thing to do to women.
Oh yeah, absolutely. And it's really, really unfair. And I have to be honest here, I mean,
it's my generation, I'm pushing 60 and I remember the things that we would talk to
do and have and value and we chucked down to our children and our grandchildren whilst
removing the means, I mean, in the UK and when I was growing up, university education
was free. We just about still have a free health service, but things were nationalised,
you paid for that, there were relatively lots of jobs.
So you were told that you got a good education, you went to got a good job, you stayed in
that job until you retired, somebody bought you a gold watch and then if you were a man
you played golf and if you were a woman, you drank tea, polished your husband's, you know,
bald spot and played a lot of bridge. And none of that is possible now. But there is
still the lingering expectations of from when a time when women, only middle class and professional
class women did not work. Working class women have always gone out to work to earn money
and raised children. They have never had the luxury of staying at home. They have always
had to subsidise their income, whether by charring, cleaning offices at two in the morning,
taking in washing, taking in mending or ironing. Working class women have always had to labour
and have always had to have lower standards. There is a huge connection as well and it's
something I just briefly touch on in the opening chapter of my book. The idea that
cleanliness equals godliness has been used as a very big stick to beat people of colour,
minorities, working class people and keep them in line to fall in with this idea of
the deserving poor. So people who had money could choose who was deserving of their philanthropy.
It's all a very unpleasant. It's quite a bit of classism. Yeah. And I mean, certainly
in Britain, classism trumps everything. You know, all that unpleasantness is trumped by
classism. It's the big thing. And it's an unpleasant idea and occasionally people come
up. And if you notice, it's very obvious that quite often people who've been brought up
from backgrounds that more deprived were quite often say, well, we've had not, but we've
clean because being clean really mattered. It was the thing that you could do that showed
that you were a better person. Yeah, I actually have that in my book as well, where I talk
about hearing a comment and it was a commenter. And I wish I could remember who they were so
that I could give them credit. But they basically talked about how growing up very poor, their
grandmother used to say, we may be poor, but we will be clean. And it was like, it was
one of the ways to try and buffer some of the discrimination that you would get as a working
class person as a person of colour. And I love when people try to come at me with the
cleanliness is godliness, because that happens in my comment sections too. And I actually
sat down and researched like, where did this phrase come from? Because a lot of people
actually think that it was like a Bible verse and it's not. And I love love now knowing
the story of cleanliness is godliness, because what it came from, there was a famous minister,
Wesley, who was giving a sermon. And this was like in the 1800s. And he was talking about
a portion of the Bible that says, you know, don't dress in fancy clothes with gold in
your hair and, you know, act like you're better than other people, which was the point of
the verse, right? Don't show up and start eating before the poor people get there, right?
Because the poor people are working and you're not. So don't adorn yourselves with gold and
silver and fancy clothes and walk about town acting as though you're better than people.
And he's he's preaching on this and he puts this caveat in there where he says, now,
what I'm not saying is that you should be purposefully unhygienic, because cleanliness
is next to godliness. And he was specifically saying, you're like, no, it's still good to
bathe like it's still good to take care of your body. I'm not saying ignore the body
like that somehow holier. And so first of all, I love that it originally, it was referring
to hygiene, not like cleaning your house. I also love that the whole point that he was
trying to make is that what you wear and your, you know, what you look like doesn't make
you better than others. And somehow that phrase, cleanliness is next to godliness is now being
used in that very way. Like, if I'm clean, I'm holier than you, I'm better than you.
But the real kicker of the story, speaking of capitalism, is that it the phrase didn't
blow up until Ivory soap company made it a marketing slogan. Yeah, it's genius on their
part. Yeah. But yeah, Ivory soap company popularized it from that Wesleyan sermon to
sell soap.
There was certainly in Great Britain, some of the big, uh, cabry, the chocolate people,
they built an entire kind of village to house their workers. But there were other things
that they expected of them that they needed to go to church, that they should be sober,
that they shouldn't, you know, that all of these things, they should do that they should
not fall into vices. Because if you were a good God fearing person, you were deserving
of charity and employment. And if you weren't a God fearing person, clean and sober, you
weren't deserving of a employment and be charity. And it's really unpleasant. And I mean, you
certainly in Britain with the industrial revolution, you got people moving into the towns for jobs,
living in, you know, terrible, terrible conditions because they needed the money. And there was,
obviously no real laws. I mean, you know, if your, your looms happen to kill children,
well, you know, it should have been a bit quicker or you need them to be little. And
but it was a way for the people who had to distance themselves from the harm that they
were doing as well, because they could just wash their hands and say, well, we are, you
know, these people, they go to church. They're good Christians. These people who don't
aren't. And the ivory soap thing makes complete sense because it's also and of course, hundreds
of years later, we're all feeling the guilt.
Yeah, it's no. I mean, I think that sometimes when you talk about cleaning and when I, you
know, we write books about cleaning and people at first have this stance, like, and everyone
asked me what my book is about or what I do. And I'm like, well, it's a book. It's called
How to Keep House While Drowning. And I basically talk about cleaning and care tasks. There's
sometimes this reaction from people about like, it's not really that deep is it? But once
you start unpacking the amount of messaging and cultural implications that come with cleaning,
care tasks, gender roles, capitalism, patriarchy, I mean, the whole bit in a thousand different
ways, those messages subconsciously creep into our day to day lives and tell us that
we're either okay or we're not okay. And the cumulation of that on top of any actual struggles,
stressors, or barriers that you're dealing with can be sometimes the tipping point of
really drowning or, you know, feeling like you're at least able to function.
Absolutely. And I know with you, you deal with care tasks while suffering from, you
know, stress, degrees of mental illness or whatever. And, you know, even certainly when
I was a young woman, autism was something that was not really, you know, I mean, we
knew what autism was. It was people who were nonverbal and basically, you know, it was
some deep and obvious malfunction somewhere. Now, obviously, we recognize along with everything
else about being human, it's a spectrum. But things like ADD, ADHD were just not recognized.
And looking back, mothers who had children who had were on the autistic spectrum who had
these issues were just considered to be bad mothers. And it was very easy while trying
to get to grips with a child who they were always taught was behaving like that because
it was their fault. All the child was bad or both couldn't keep up with basic care stuff.
It caused a lot of long term lasting harm that people are still feeling today.
Yeah. And then you look at the things that that mother can't keep up with because she's
dealing with extra energy expenditures with children that need more help. Well, not only
that, but then whatever she's not able to keep up with around the house as a result
of having to spend extra energy with her kids that might have these legitimate barriers,
that becomes the evidence of see that she's not a good parent. And that's what happens.
And what child does not grows up to believe that they are a bad person because they cannot
do these things. And if they have children, this is then this cascades down the generations.
It's not none of these subjects are small things. They cannot be dismissed. They need
to be addressed and looked at. Well, so let me do I want to sort of wrap up with this.
I have one question and it's pertaining to your skill and knowledge about how to clean
everything. And that is my kids have written on the walls with crayon, not a ton, just
like a little bit here and there to where you don't notice it. But it's now been there
for so long that it doesn't just come off with a wipe. And I'm not actually sure what
you use to get like very old crayon off of walls. You can try melamine sponge, which
is what sold a stain erases, but don't buy them in boxes that cost a lot of money. I
buy mine for templates of pop because they as you wet them, use them, they disintegrate
very quickly. White spirit, I think it sold as mineral spirit in America is the stuff you
use to thin paint with and clean paint brushes with a little bit of that on a rag. It's
the solvent for crayon. It removes crayon just like that. If the wall is matte and porous,
you may then find it leaves like a greasy mark. And if that doesn't dry off, you then
wash it with hot soapy water and get it off that way. Thank you. I've always been too
afraid to try anything because I'm afraid I'll take the paint off with whatever I'm trying
to use to get the crayon off. Well, that comes down to the you are trying to find the solvent
for the mark without destroying the under sofa. However, when you are decorating and you have
got bits of paint left, you decant them into jars with screw top lids and label them with
the room because paint in a jam jar with painting it, the paint stays fresh. It doesn't
stay fresh if you've got two inches in the bottom of the big tub. That's smart. You just
repaint over. Thank you. So, Anne, where can people find you if they want to follow you
online? I am on TikTok as Anne Russell O3 and Anne Russell 13 is my backup account because
if I get community violations, they stop me posting for a long time. However, I'm also
on Instagram, but to be honest, that's a site I'm mostly on TikTok. I'm technologically
rubbish and I'm very lazy. TikTok suits me. There's only a couple of people on it. I
just talked to the phone. It's all good. That's how I feel about TikTok, too. It's just I
don't really know how to work anything else. All right, cool. Well, thank you, Anne. And
by the time you guys are listening to this, her book will be out, at least in the UK, how
to clean everything, a practical down-to-earth guide for anyone who doesn't know where to
start. And if you're in the US, hang tight because it'll be here soon. And it's on a
Kindle. So, if you want to do it on a Kindle, you can get it on a Kindle or an audiobook.
Are you, do you read the audiobook? I do, indeed. Yes, I love that. Awesome. Well, I will be looking
forward to consuming it as soon as I get my hands on it. And thank you again. Thank you
for having me.
Bye.
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