You are viewing this site in staging mode. Click in this bar to return to normal site.

Housekeeping

Alexa
15 December 2015 16:00

I’m going to be completely honest here. I quite enjoy housework. (No, please stay with me – there is a point to this post …)

 

It’s just as well, really, as we have a large, blond Labrador who drops copious amounts of hair, the odd dollop of mud and who-knows-what-else about the place, and it needs cleaning up with alarming regularity. All fine, if it wasn’t for the fact that cleaning takes time. So much time. Our dog mega-moults. Constantly. I’m sure I could have stuffed at least three mattresses in the time I’ve had him - and why he’s not bald …? But perhaps that’s a discussion for another blog post.

 

Time for me, as for most of us, seems in short supply. So the hairs tend to pile up as days disappear in whirls of activity, not the least of which is earning a living.

 

Which brings me to the point of this post. (You see? I told you there was one.)

 

I like to tidy. I enjoy taking something that needs a bit of a sort-out, dusting it down and sprucing it up. I love to see the transformation and bask briefly in the fruits of my efforts. (Where my house is concerned, the basking is indeed brief as the hairs never stop falling.)

 

But I’m convinced that’s why I enjoy editorial work. Copy editing and proofreading – they’re the spit ’n’ polish. The effort and attention to detail that bring about a clean and crisply professional finish to a manuscript. With the fundamentals in place, we editors and proofreaders power in with the elbow grease (metaphorically speaking), and, where necessary, shake it up and iron it out.

 

In short, we give it a good old tidy. And for me, with my housekeeper’s mentality, there’s something really rather satisfying about that.