Washing dishes by hand is rightly romanticised. But the miracle that is the household dishwasher is a gift – a game, a puzzle, a perfect hobby, writes Duncan Greive.
You’ll always find me in the kitchen at parties, re-stacking the dishwasher. It takes a certain level of familiarity with the host, because it can and should be read as a critique of the technique of those who’ve stacked before me. And I do know that rearranging the contents of a dishwasher doesn’t scream as the behaviour of a super fun guest. I’m not expecting this confession to have anything but a negative impact on the already low number of dinner party invites I get.
Instead this comes from trying to accept and embrace my fundamental nature as a person, rather than resist it. In this post-pandemic, pre-recession era, leaning into your hobbies no matter how socially devastating they are is a form of self care. Basically, I like to stack dishwashers, and I think that’s OK.
Stacking dishwashers is the centrepiece of my larger hobby, cleaning the kitchen. Taking the happy sprawl of domestic life and bringing order to that chaos is deeply soothing to me. I attack it in a specific order – first composting food scraps, then trudging the Marmite and butter to the pantry, knowing it will be back in minutes. Then compacting and sorting recycling. It’s all deeply satisfying.
The dishwasher is the holy sacrament though, the heart of the job. I save it until last – the treat, a solvable organisational puzzle waiting for me. A thing I can control and achieve in a world which is otherwise unnerving and spinning too fast.
I realise that this is not a universally felt sentiment. I adored my colleague Charlotte Muru-Lanning’s ode to handwashing dishes, her praise of the practice as “meditative and perfectly solitary… a time for clarity and both literal and figurative digestion”. The piece, funny and thoughtful, also functions as a vicious drive-by on the dishwasher, for which Muru-Lanning has an “absolute hatred”. She goes on to write that “it’s pretty clear these machines severely over-promise the amount of labour they actually save. If appliances could talk to each other, the dishwasher would be the laughing stock of the household.”
Yet I feel the same sense of peace as she does with hands in soapy water when I’m stacking, and think that, done well, with everything in the right place, it can make the machine operate to its full, glorious potential. When you really consider the dishwasher, it’s quite a mindblowing object – a box into which you place your guilty, filthy dishes, only to have them emerge gleaming and sterile in an hour or so. Our species has achieved little of greater consequence.
For all that promise, it only delivers if properly stacked. There are some basic errors which seem constantly made – cutlery goes handle up, since your hands are inherently disgusting and should obviously be kept as far from the food-touching surface as possible. Other parts are more stylistic – I like the Tetris-like quality of finding a place for every piece of crockery, while still thinking about the mysterious dynamics of the waterflow beyond the door.
Some people stack it like cubist-era Picasso, all odd angles, mugs on the bottom drawer, plates on the top, and little piles of bowls stuck tight together. That’s a recipe for the dirt to bake on, set fast, somehow the hardest material known to humanity. I aspire to stack like Le Corbusier planned cities: clean lines, logical layouts, an effortless grace. Just enough creativity to make the job satisfying, just enough craft to give the machine its best shot at doing its vital job.
(I’m aware this makes me sound insufferable; I try not to talk to people about my passion. My personality is extra enough without that additional burden.)
At one party I met someone who showed me just how far I have to go to achieve dishwasher stacking transcendence. She watched idly as I restacked, pretty pleased with my work. As I finished up, she got up off her stool and asked if she could have a go. I said sure, confident that it was at optimal capacity, that any attempt to reorientate would only lead to disaster.
Ten minutes later it was a whole new space. There were maybe a third more dishes inside, each with just enough clear air coating them. To this day, I don’t know how she did it – this was virtuoso stacking, with a vision and precision which seemed to defy physics. It’s now a year on, and I’m still thinking about that stack, long after the rest of the party has faded from memory.
Instead of being dispirited by this humbling, I felt a new energy. I’m into the back half of my life, but there are thousands more dishwashers to be stacked. I will never achieve what I saw that night, I’m sure. But the daily communion with that big steel box will still bring challenge and joy for decades to come.
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