Anne Enright has a poetic way with household routine as recently aired on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Truths on the subject of vacuuming. This week she's turned her thoughts to laundry. When Anne got married her mother gave her a washing machine because her mother thought a husband could be like a washing machine, gentle, reliable, and untiring. He could hearten and refresh and make things new but he couldn’t get clothes clean - at least not at the press of a button. Anne thinks that washing machines and marriages have a lot in common. They both click on, from cycle to cycle, they both get in a spin from time to time and they both make things alright again, in their way.
Anne's washday memories took her back to childhood: her mother wrestling with a top loader - and the cartoon flatness as your favourite dress sprang out of the wringer. Then there was the great revolution of the automatic which meant you had to read the handbook every time you used it. Around this time the advertising world got itself into a lather and produced endless soap powder adverts with dancing shirts and enzymes that would deal with even the most stubborn of stains.
Anne's favourite memory of washday involves the sight of washing drying in the sun.
"Our next door neighbour had seven sons and by half past eight on a Monday morning you could see 49 shirts, and 98 socks pegged out in the breeze...the socks were in pairs, the shirts coded by colour and size, there was pleasure in it - it wasn’t just about getting things clean."
