Random recollection: My mom told me she wanted to teach me and my brother some basic housekeeping skills: cooking, cleaning, that sort of thing. Dad wouldn’t allow it, apparently because it was women’s work.
Fast-forward a couple years: I was living on my own in an apartment in England. I had to call my mother to ask how to bake a potato. I did actually try to bake it myself before I called her. I don’t recall what I did wrong, but it was not at any time during my kitchen experiment what I would have considered edible, and back then I was okay with a lot of canned foods that I would not eat now except as a last resort following a global catastrophe.
I suppose eventually it would have occurred to me to visit the library to check out a cook book, but honestly I had no clue at all and could conceivably have starved during the lag between trying to learn through trial and error, and twigging to the idea that I should put my hands on at least a few examples of one of the most well-documented human activities of all time.
Maybe some day I’ll tell you how long it took me to warm to the idea that I should, from time to time, vacuum the floors of the rooms I lived in. Maybe. Maybe not.
This Is Drivel 