Clean and dirty dirt

Clean and dirty dirt

I had a work and football mate, who made a strict distinction. “There's clean dirt, and there's dirty dirt”. Now, I know the first is an oxymoron, and there seems no end of redundancy in the second. But he was right, absolutely spot on. Asbestos does not go to landfill with the shrinkwrap and crisp bags. Clinical waste goes into those special clinical waste incineration only containers. Data, too. I've been on a few runs taking away shredded documents that someone might just think worthwhile to do a de-shred jigsaw exercise on, and returning with a certificate of assured total destruction.

Examples. Clean dirt lives in the grate after an open fire, and is what you jet wash from the car or patio when you can be bothered with the faffing about. Dirty dirt is harder to define, and is dirty for various reasons:

Persistence. When you move kitchen appliances there's that layer of grease binding the normal dust, debris and pet hair into a sticky mass that, when you get it on your skin, isn't going away with soap and water, acid or anything less than amputation.

Pong. Rod blocked drains. Just once. Even if it doesn't take very long. That gets into your skin and the smell lingers. Forever. After that long, hot bath in 50% water, 25% Dettol and 25% bleach, continued scrubbing with sponge, loofah, flannel, soft brush, stiff brush, nail brush and wire brush, you tentatively raise the back of one hand to your nose. No. How can this be? Still there. Hence the song, Shine Up Your Buttons (known as My Father's a Lavatory Cleaner): “Some say that he died of a fever, some say that he died of a fit, but I know what my old man died of, he died of the smell of the...”.

Provenance. Rule of thumb. If it comes from a living thing and isn't the sweat of someone you love dearly, it's dirty dirt.

The high road and the low road

That reminded me of a fire in a small flat, belonging to an old lady who was suffering with dementia. We didn't know that she wasn't in there, so were assuming the worst. Luckily she'd gone out. The cavalry had yet to arrive so there were two of us, and despite the rulebook saying otherwise, we did what anyone would do and split up. You can't see anything in thick black smoke. Forget the films and TV series giving false impressions. You have a torch and an air gauge on your breathing set, and you shine the torch onto the gauge at point blank range right in front of your visor and if you're lucky you can make out how much air you have left. Two taps on the shoulder and some hand signals, and he went right (bedroom and bathroom as it turned out) and I went left with the hosereel (it was hotter and noisier that way, kitchen and sitting room).

Heat goes upwards and while you can crawl, stand and your ears start to crisp up and that hurts, so we were both crawling.

I checked the sitting room and the kitchen, empty. Checked again more slowly, still crawling, opened some windows and put out the fire in the kitchen.

Slowly the smoke cleared and things became visible. The old lady was a smoker and the sitting room and kitchen were awash with empty cigarette packets and fagash, takeaway empties and drained cans of stout. I was covered in ash and leftover food, some fag packets were stuck to my tunic and leggings. This was comparatively clean dirt, though, because my partner had gone right to the bedroom via the overflowing (for a long, long time overflowing) blocked toilet, and then into the toilet itself. Breathing clean, medical-quality air, there's no smell-clue as to what you're crawling through. I'd been lucky. He was properly smothered in rank dirty dirt. Naturally, while insisting that we were only concerned for his health and wellbeing, while actually only concerned for ourselves, we made sure he went off in an ambulance for hospital decontamination. Well, you don't want that dirty dirt next to you all the way back to the station, do you?