The laundry challenge

Day Nine of 'The Daily Post'.

“I love you English and Scottish women! I must admit I'm an American who has been spoiled my entire life by a tumble dryer. I'm reconciling to the idea of line-drying when I move to England in a couple of months. I have one very important question for you, though -- and please don't laugh. What do you do when it is winter and raining or snowing? The "drying cabinent" at my boyfriend's house is small and there are only two radiators that I can put socks on to warm-dry them. Do you have secret clothing lines that come out from trap doors in the halls and extend into the kitchen? I'm not being funny here -- I truly would like to whole-heartedly embrace something that is so good for the environment. I could easily dry my clothing if I had a yard in California as the weather is so nice, but what do you do in stretches of rain?”

This was a comment on my post about washing lines. It got me thinking about one aspect of expat life which is a real pain in the ass. It is this. People are used to their own way of life, and find it very hard to explain to a newbie why or how they do things. I found myself wanting to reply to Rachel, the commenter, “It’s hard to explain, but it’s just a question of muddling through. Don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it.” And then I thought how really frustrating that would be for her.

It took me right back to my early days here, when things that seemed just a part of life to everyone, were compete mysteries to me. Mysteries that they didn’t seem able to explain. Of course part of the frustration is that you can see their point. There are so many things in life that can’t be explained very easily. Or explaining them is just the beginning. What really needs to happen, is for you to jump in, try a few things a few different ways, and then after finding one that works and repeating it for a while, you are just as much an expert as all the rest of them. A little help to get you started is, actually, a big help, but there are no short cuts to experience.

Incidentally, my husband wrote a whole PhD thesis on this very subject. What a waste of those years, when all along he had a wife who could sum it up in a paragraph! I should just have discovered blogging a few years earlier, and we’d have saved ourselves a lot of time and money - though the university might not have awarded him a doctorate and the right to wear a fancy hat on the basis of one paragraph in a blog post. Universities are picky like that.

But back to Rachel. In my early days, I often did pose questions such as hers to the blogging community, because (a) it was a lot quicker and easier than asking 10 local people, and I didn’t even know 10 local people at that point, but it meant I got 10 answers, (b) I got fed up with asking basic questions to people face to face - it didn’t make for great conversation, and (c) I quickly came to realize what a fabulous bunch is out there in the blogosphere, and what top quality answers they gave.

So, on Rachel’s behalf, tell me. How on earth DO we manage to get washing dry, in the British climate, with no tumble dryer? I mean, talk about setting a difficult challenge. Rachel’s boyfriend is already a huge step ahead of me (and I thought I was a pretty impressive laundry operator), because I don’t even know what a ‘drying cabinet’ is. Unless it’s what a Prime Minister appoints if he/she wants to counteract the effects of a government of Tory wets.

Let me start us all off. Rachel, I did have a tumble dryer in Scotland, for emergencies, but I hardly ever used it because there’s this marvellous thing called a drying rack. It’s worth taking time and choosing a good one. By good one, I mean one that will make the maximum use of the space you have available. A lot of people have the rack in the kitchen, where it is a permanent annoyance and gets in the way of whatever you are doing. Other people put it in the bath, where it stands for days on end with semi-dry clothes, because bathrooms are cold and draughty in the UK, and it’s only eternal optimism (see ‘Dunkirk spirit’ in my previous laundry post) that keeps us in the belief that the clothes will actually dry in there. Radiators are a good bet, even if your boyfriend only has two small ones in his small house. As he has perhaps already told you, size isn’t everything.

We Brits are prepared to spend more time and effort on laundry than our US counterparts, so that we are quite happy to get up from the sofa at intervals throughout the evening, even though this means interrupting our viewing of splendid BBC programmes since there are no commercial breaks (which, come to think of it, would actually be useful for laundry purposes), and remove a few dry socks to make space for the next lot of them. We are a bit laundry obsessed, truth be told, so that first thing in the morning, when we get out of bed, our topmost priority isn’t to get the coffee maker on, but to remove the dry socks from the radiators and put out the next batch of damp ones.

As for those secret lines coming out from trap doors, no, we don’t have those but it’s a magnificent idea, which you should develop, take to the Dragons’ Den (UK equivalent of the Sharks’ Tank), and use to make a fortune. Then you and your boyfriend will be able to buy a big house and install a huge tumble dryer in it.

Come on, fabulous British laundry experts. What other tips and advice do you have for Rachel?