with a hint of colour

It was recently suggested that it might be time for me to update my collection of hated office-shirts after several years of not bothering to put the white shirts in a white wash had had what was perceived as a lasting and detrimental effect on their appearance. All other white clothings are accorded the respect they deserve (especially as almost none of them are mine) and there are expections made for my white items which need to remain white (of which there is currently only one, my stupid bow-tie-compatible dress shirt thing which probably won't get used again any time soon in the absence of any forthcoming weddings) but as my work shirts were only getting worn at work and there might not be enough other white things to warrant a whites-only wash each week I generally shoved all four shirts and my work trousers in the same wash after bringing them all home on Thursday, only altering this habit when I generally started bringing each day's shirt home on the day it was worn in order to not end up with an overstuffed bag each Thursday. A great deal of the whiteness of white shirts is in any case due to the initial presence of whiteners which gradually disappear as the shirt ages so a certain dulling of the initial bluey-whiteness is inevitable; a couple of washes with a couple of new and very dark items resulted in the shirts getting infested with lots of small, dark bonus fibres which was noticed when they were hanging up drying one weekend. I don't particularly like spending vast amounts of cash on workwear and currently have an imminent additional requirement for work-shoe-replacement but it's probably a few years since the last shirt-upgrade in the January "sales" a few years ago. Unfortunately the things most reduced were the silly-priced "luxury" shirts which are generally far more uncomfortably warming and sweatifying than the cheap shirts so it was the cheap ones which were purchased even though the damaged items have since mostly recovered and are just greyish rather than greyish-with-black-flecks. In a side-by-side test there's little visible difference between one of the new ones (top) and the older examples (though not the bottom one which is meant to be sort of pigeon-greyish-beige) to the camera's eye though the new ones are noticeably stiffer when worn and appear to be coated with that unpleasant impermeable plastic substance new shirts are generally coated with which prevents air from easily passing across the fabric until they've been un-ecologically-soundly-boil-washed a few times.

On the plus side I now have sufficient shirts to be able to stick three weeks' worth into my locker if I so choose to be able to avoid having to iron anything on Sunday afternoons when I could be out walking off the past few days' large meals and laughing at staff in mobile telephone shops when they reveal that they don't stock any replacement mobile telephone batteries.