Rob and I will be looking for a new place to rent soon, either in Edinburgh or London - depending on whether I decide on Edinburgh University or University College London (U.C.L.), both of which I’ve been accepted to. Either way, we’ll have to pack up most of Rob’s stuff (which is currently residing in his parents house) and drive it to wherever we end up. I don’t know about you, but I don’t see the point in packing three old and broken mobile phones, several old cables which don’t have homes (and which are unidentifiable), fifty or so books which are out of date or have been read already, and several old gadgets which are either incapacitated or have been replaced by something half their size and twice as fast. As such, I convinced Rob to list his old stuff on eBay, with the promise that he could use the profits to buy a new flat screen TV. Unsurprisingly this sounded like a very appealing idea to him, so today we’ve been sorting through years of collected ’stuff’.

After an hour or so of this cleaning and sorting, I realised that it’s spring over here in the UK, which technically made what we were doing a ’spring clean’. I wondered why it was called a spring clean (to which Rob unhelpfully responded, ‘Because you do it in Spring’), so I decided to hit Google and Wikipedia. It turns out spring cleaning probably came from the Iranian New Year holiday - Nowruz - which occurs on the first day of Spring, and which traditionally would be accompanied by the practice of ‘khooneh takouni’, which means ’shaking the house’ (or giving it a very thorough clean). Other theories are that the Jewish holiday of Passover is usually preceded by giving the house a thorough clean, and Passover usually falls in the March-April period which also sees in the season of Spring in the Northern hemisphere. In Orthodox Christianity, the week before Lent is traditionally filled with cleaning duties - Lent precedes Easter, which also occurs in Spring. Then of course there is the theory that in centuries past, when cold winters were warded off by smokey fires which blackened the walls, ceilings and furniture of everything indoors, spring would be the first opportunity to put the fires out and give everything a thorough clean.

I wonder if any of the people that undertook spring cleaning in times past had an incentive like the purchase of a flat screen TV to keep them going?