Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
The places we build are inextricably linked to society. Our cities, our houses, our public spaces are all reflections of the society that built them. Today we build minimalist facades on utilitarian buildings, a reflection of a society that sees the diversion of wealth to non-utilitarian efforts as a waste, and therefore evil. Why waste money on extravagance when you could use it to build more homes for the needy?
But the difference between the mood of the zeitgeist and our architecture is their respective lifespans. While the values and structure of society can change with enormous speed, the buildings we must reside in last far longer. This is true for the lower class, still in the post-war concrete cuboids that we have all now agreed are awful in both form and in function. But it is also for the upper class, socially conscious celebrities living in mansions built for imperialist merchants and their entourage of two dozen servants.
And just as society can shift once away from the foundations of our houses, it can shift again. Take the history of the Victorian emerging middle class. In the latter half of the 19th century, a group of previously lower class families started to emerge into the upper class. They had wealth and prestige but no land, and so built many large, but not so large, houses, often on the outskirts of the bloated and toxic industrial centres they had made their money. They were built for those living slightly above their actual means, built to impress with large entrance halls, lounges and dining rooms, but far undersized kitchens and bedrooms. They also incorporated the required means to host one or two live-in servants. Typically a family of this standing would employ one live-in maid and share a gardener with their neighbour. With two extra hands (often three since the wives didn't have to work either) the large living spaces and expansive gardens could be managed, it takes a lot of work to maintain such a household. And so the era of long lawns and spotless carpets reached its heyday.
But as time passed and society shifted away from the master-servant social norm of the time, and also due to the waning wealth on Britain, these houses became more and more unviable to maintain. Still the homes of the middle class families, but they could no longer afford a maid or gardener to keep the house running. And so we reach the decline of Victorian properties that my grandparents generation knew (and who some still live). A clean living space but with disused areas of the house, often rooms collecting dust or bedrooms left locked for decades. But the gardens had it worse, the Victorian ideal of a long lawn became an impossibility and many gardens turned into impenetrable thickets. Common practise was to hedge or fence off the first third of the garden, and promptly forget about the remaining portion and leave it for nature.
Talking to my Father this is how his family found his childhood house when he moved there in the 1960s. And it was became the project of my Grandfather for the next twenty years to push back and tame the forest of brambles and nettles to retake the land. In this particular garden there still exists the clear remnants of this. A thick hedge cordoning of the quarter, and then another fence two thirds up. But now this garden is completely tamed, and while my family was particularly early in taking on the challenge, now the whole row of houses have restored their gardens to former glory. And so we come to the second shift, modern people, as much as we like to pretend we don't, live much easier and better off lives than almost anyone two centuries ago. We have far more time off to upkeep our houses, we have far fewer chores to do outside the house (think travel times and supermarkets) and we even have a host of technology to make the domestic chores far easier. Washing machines, lawnmowers, electric ovens. All of these constitute the modern domestic maid, and allow us to restore the lifestyle of the nouveau-riche and make these homes we find ourselves in workable once again.
