Throughout my life, I’ve gained an uncanny talent for collecting stains, unintentionally. It seems apt to give me the title of “Patsy McGarry, the Stain Harvester”, which sounds akin to a job title. The result is a significantly larger collection of defaced shirts in Ireland, only bested by my assortment of tarnished ties which fell victim in an attempt to preserve my shirts.
A major aspect of this conundrum is my rapid consumption of food. My late mother found it difficult to watch me ravage through my usual medium to well-done steak. It was not only the speed at which I dispatched the unfortunate grilled creature, but also the quantity of food I crammed into my mouth in one go.
I laid the blame on her, arguing that having seven of us led me to adopt the habit of gulping down large chunks of food at breakneck speed. This was a survival tactic I picked up as a kid and it stuck with me into adulthood. Alas, she was unconvinced.
A side effect of these rapid eating escapades was a clear lack of finesse. As one might expect, I found myself in a disastrous affair with spaghetti bolognese, a dish I adore. Yet after savouring a plate of it, I end up looking like a butcher who’s just left the abattoir, with tomato-based sauce smeared across my napkin. In such meals, my napkin is worn like a baby’s bib, yet the effectiveness varies.
The result is countless shirts bearing the mark of tomato sauce, a stain which is both difficult to rid and explain. Once, I pushed a laundrette owner to her limits with my multitude of stained shirts, resulting in a robust lecture about stain removal difficulties and my reckless stained shirts accumulation.
I swore to reform, and did stick to it for some time. However, the allure of spaghetti bolognese was too strong to resist indefinitely. That would be cruel.
Admittedly, she could have applied detergent on the sauce stain, rubbed an ice cube over it, added vinegar, used a clean cloth, and then washed it as usual. But, I didn’t have the gall to suggest this to her.
Remarkably, the origin of the word ‘stain’ appears to be a blend of the Old Norse word ‘steina’ and a truncated version of Middle English ‘disteynen’.