my Lady Batten

keeping a house spick and span is a little like painting the Forth Bridge - once you've reached the end, you have to start all over again at the beginning. . .so having almost completed the renovation of the front space, planted bay where there was lavender, moved the lavender to a gap between the bamboo, repainted the brickwork, stripped and repainted the front door (was blue, now black), stripped and repainted the French windows to the courtyard, moved all the pots around and replanted some with ivy and grasses and rosemary, having almost finished painting the banisters on the main landing, having purchased the paint for the breakfast room, having made three trips to the dump in the last two weeks (clothes and books for the charity/recycling bins), having used up the last of the dreaded yellow paint on a single wall behind my poster of Rear Window

(it's the same colour as the title font)

and on a bookshelf from which I removed all the children's book and put them away for the next fifteen-twenty years and then reorganised the art books and the poetry books and the novels from my youth, today I find myself three floors up in Mini-Teen's room. . . oh, and the term "spick and span"?

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first citation November 15th, 1665, Samuel Pepys' diary: 'my Lady Batten walking through the dirty lane with new spicke and span white shoes'; from spick-and-span-new - literally 'new as a recently made spike and chip of wood' (1570s), from spick (“nail”, variant of spike) + Middle English span-new (“very new”, from c1300, Old Norse "span-nyr"). . .
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. . .from spann (“chip”, cognate to Old English spón, Modern English spoon, due to old spoons being made of wood) + nyr (“new”, cognate to Old English nīwe, Modern English new). . .

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. . .imitation of Dutch spiksplinter nieuw (literally “spike-splinter new”), for a freshly built ship. . . observe that fresh woodchips are firm and light (if from light wood), but decay and darken rapidly, hence the origin of the term. . .

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so now you know!