And so, when I gave Dinner partiesI relaxed the rule. Happily, for my post-natal anxiety, Google wasn’t what it is now, so I didn’t know that shoe soles—even if they were Louboutin-red—had up to 800,000 different bacteria, 96 percent of which tested positive for coliform bacteria (yes, that’s what we really don’t want to think about), and that’s more than the first 9 percent. Having a step doormat helps, but only to an extent; They usually remove between 30 percent and 50 percent of bacteria (although they’re good at getting rid of dirt that looks like mud.) I’d get up early the next morning and clean—but while my mopping of the kitchen floor was fine, my post-event hoovering wouldn’t have done much: the carpet and rugsAs I have since discovered, steam cleaning is needed to remove bacteria.
Five years ago, when we left London for the East Sussex coast, I mostly stopped asking people to take off their shoes. My kids were older, and I tempered my pollution worries with the completely unfounded belief that beach dirt was cleaner than city dirt, and growing up would disintegrate everything anyway. This was comforting until I came across the previously quoted statistics.
The problem is that many people in this country do not like to take off their shoes. Reasons given included: ‘It’s too intimate’, ‘It’s faff unlacing’, ‘His floors looked dirtier than my shoes’, and ‘I think it’s inappropriate to ask.’ There are also vague excuses: someone might have holes in their socks, a chipped pedicure, or need the structural support that shoes provide. Arguably, some points are fair.
We might similarly wonder if, in today’s multicultural society, it is bad manners not to offer to take off our shoes. My suggestion to do so is often met with some relief, indicating that we are on the cusp of a seismic shift, supported, I think, by the increasing number of homes in which shoes can be worn. kitchen But it must be removed before venturing further, or going upstairs – a sort of fudging attempt to play down what is perceived as uptight-ness. Mass repositioning makes sense. Because to return to Jilly Cooper, she combined her passion for cleanliness with not having servants and, well, times have changed. The question is what else needs to be improved to reflect this.
