Home Truth

Whilst looking in vain for some ant powder in the garage, I came across a blast from the past - a half full plastic bottle of Ark window cleaner. What a find! Out of the ark more like! We worked out it must be twenty years old and have moved house with us six times. It gave my techno freak an excuse to look it up on the internet to see what had become of the company (not a trace) and hours of endless fun teasing me that I had only managed to use half a bottle of window cleaning fluid in twenty years! He reckons it says a lot about my priorities or something.

For those of you who did not join the green revolution in the eighties, Ark was one of the first companies set up to produce ecological household cleaning products and was endorsed by Linda McCartney. Ring any bells now?

I wonder why they chose Ark as a name. Maybe because being green in those days provoked as much ridicule as Noah did when he started building an enormous boat on dry land with no water in sight. Maybe because their success was only to last forty days and forty nights. Maybe because they could see the environmental storm coming and wanted to do something to minimise the damage.

I have a feeling that my window cleaner may be past its best. I’m absolutely useless at windows anyway. Lack of practice probably. Anyway, I wonder what those people from Ark have gone on to do - probably still building an ark of some kind or another, still warning of impending disaster, still facing ridicule.

There was only one Noah. Twenty years ago there were a few. Now we are many. Together we can make a difference.

Filed under: green cleaning on June 30th, 2007