Lever Brothers will give you your money back

I fail at American laundry.

I didn't have a lot in the way of chores, as a child: I always set the table for dinner, I did some dusting now and then when asked, and most of the ironing fell to me. I have no idea who, if anyone, did the hoovering and the bathrooms; let's assume that happened when I was at school.

Anyway. Laundry, in Ireland, is different from in America. In Ireland I could put a pair of jeans in the basket and not see them again for two weeks. First they might sit there for up to a week, since our tidy three-person family didn't generate much washing. Monday was wash-day, and a load would be done: probably not sorted into colours and whites as that would mean you only had enough for half a load each, so I constantly had t-shirts that were white for the first week of their lives and pale blue/green/pink thereafter. European front-loader machines do the job properly, and take about 2 hours or more. It's like watching a movie, only less interesting. Like watching Dances With Wolves, then.

Now for the tedious bit. You hang the laundry out on the line, in the grey not-quite-misty day with a temperature around 10C (that's 50F). It threatens to rain. You dash outside and take them all in. The sun comes out. You hang them out again. You go out. The heavens open and it pours. By the time you get home there's no point doing anything, so unless you actually feel like taking them back in and running the spin cycle again, you leave them there. After three days of this, you bring them into the house and hang them on a clothes horse, or in the bathroom, or on all the radiators, or on the backs of the dining room chairs, or all of the above. After another three days, you try to iron them dry.

You finally put the flattened, folded, and still slightly damp clothes neatly in the airing cupboard, and in another two days they'll be good to wear. Or else you decide to air them and press them at the same time by sleeping on them. (My dad sleeps with his trousers under the mattress every night to keep the crease in. It has never occurred to me until right this second that that's a bit odd. But I always wondered what trouser presses in hotel rooms were for.)

I remember, more than once, wishing fervently for a magic laundry box that would let me deposit dirty clothes, press a button, and remove magically clean, dry, and ironed ones.

Now I live in America, and all my laundry-related dreams have come true. The top-loader takes less than ten minutes to run a cycle, and can fit a king-sized duvet if I need it to. Right beside it sits the lovely, wonderful tumble dryer: a scant hour or so in there, and the clothes come out warm, bone dry, and practically crease free. I use the iron once a year, when I take my summer stuff out of the suitcase it lives in over the winter and anything with linen in it really needs a run over. And our airing cupboard is just the press where towels live. I don't think it's anywhere near the hot-water cylinder, as they are at home.

(My brother in law and I were just discussing ironing, or the fact that nobody does it any more. (I don't remember why. He phoned. We were chatting. Anyway.) He said there was a woman who had been struck by lightning while ironing. He thought the chances of that must be infinitesimally small: for one thing, it's unlikely you'll be struck by lightning; for another, nobody irons any more: how on earth could both happen to anyone at the same time? (This also shows that ironing is dangerous. You should stop doing it.))

So it's all wonderful here in the future. Except that American washing machines fail at one tiny detail. My clothes are wet, and then they're dry, and they smell nice. But they're not noticeably any cleaner. And once they're out of the dryer, that's it: the stain is baked in and it won't be gone till I go home at Christmas and use my mother's machine. (Hmm. A thought. Maybe it's the rain that takes the stains out in Ireland, not the washing machine. Thank you, Sellafield*?)

I suspect that American housewives spend a lot of time - the time that Irish housewives spend gazing at the clouds and calculating the time it will take to get home from the shops, and running in and out to the line - stainbusting. And pre-treating and bleaching and soaking, and doing things with buckets and baking soda and old toothbrushes. I'm scared of bleach, and I forget to pre-treat even when I have the Clorox pen right there beside the washing machine, and if I put anything in a bucket, that's just asking a child to mess with it. Sometimes I throw in a scoop of Oxy-Clean with the detergent, but I don't think it does anything. I wash everything on Warm, because I washed everything at 40C at home, and I think it's the same. Hot is bad for the environment, and my wash is never full of just cotton whites or anything that could take bleach and hot water. I'm obviously Doing It Rong, again.

At least my children rarely eat anything that stains, other than chocolate. Beetroot is right out.


* Sellafield is a nuclear power plant in England on the coast of the Irish Sea. In the past it has been blamed for many woes that befell the Irish population. Not the famine: that was the fault of the English in a different way. Just FYI.