New Washer!

My new washer arrived last night two hours after dark. Very exciting! My son unpacked it from its factory carton and installed it in my laundry room, quite a big task. It is a 21st Century model with lights and peeps. My old one was firmly based in the 20th Century with neither lights nor peeps. Of course we had to try it straight away. There was plenty of dirty laundry to test it with. It did an excellent job.

As my washing dried in the bright sunshine and bitter southerly I thought of laundry facilities in houses I have lived in. The earliest I remember was the house with the hole in the hedge. It had a pair of wooden tubs and a boiler consisting of a drum with a fire grate underneath, all situated outside in front of the house. The water was carried from a spring some distance away.

Then we lived in a series of three houses that came with Dad's Public Works Department job. They had a copper, which was a deep copper bowl enclosed in concrete with a firebox underneath, and two tubs, wooden at first, then concrete. Somewhere in this time my mother bought a hand wringer to go with her glass scrubbing board.

My first flat had a couple of concrete tubs with hot and cold water, situated in a spooky basement. I did my washing in the bathroom for weeks after seeing Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

Then came the era of the wringer-washer, that went on for many years. I'm convinced the wringer-washer was designed by men to keep a woman in her place. When I ditched my last one and replaced it with an automatic I had so much time to spare that I went to university and earned myself two degrees.

One year ago: Avalanche on the mountain.