Line Tales « Cherry Menlove

Line Tales

Line Tales

When Robert the Husband & I first lived together in a small apartment in London we had a special place for the clothes drier to go. On a small but perfectly sized piece of hallway outside our bedroom. You didn’t bash into it should you need to get up in the middle of the night and you couldn’t see it as you walked in the front door.

We had very little outside space at this time and to be honest if we’d put the drier outside the clothes would have come back in dirtier than they had been before their wash due to the London air. Nice!

I did attempt to make my own washing line on the balcony. Not liking to be defeated I fashioned a length of rope and bought some vintage dolly pegs (!). It worked well until I put the first wet towel onto it, whereby it dropped to the ground and the towel had to be re-washed.

When we moved out of the city and in to a house in a town in Surrey I had another go at making my own washing line. I asked our new neighbours if they minded me tying some rope around one of their gate posts and set about trying to make a washing line by myself for the second time around.

This one didn’t work out for me either.

The part of the garden with the line in it was up a flight of stairs and it got to the point that if it rained I had to decide whether or not I could bothered to ascend those steps in order to retrieve my ‘almost dry until the rain came’ clothing.

More often than not the answer was a resounding “No”

I grew up with washing lines. We were all taught how to put the washing out and told by my Mum that “double thickness doesn’t dry”. This was usually spoken when I had a more pressing engagement in front of the television and threw the bedding over the line, no pegs , and hoisted it up. Hoping in vain that the washing would miraculously dry even though it was plopped in large bundles on top of each other and now balancing precariously ten feet up in the air.

Some of the things from our childhood we are more than willing to let go of. Others we forget and some we re-visit. It made sense to me to have a straight washing line like this one in the new house. I have found the hole for the rotary line should Robert & I feel the urge to do huge amounts over the weekend but this line I can see from the house. The clothes dry very quickly, it was cheaper than the rotary line we bought ( and that now feels somewhat abandoned) and I get to feel like I’m the protagonist in a piece of American literature each time I hoist the line upwards towards the sky using the post in the middle.

This line was and is part of the ‘Projects with my Dad’series and I will upload full instructions on how to make one anon. But when it comes to showing other folk how to do something you had better make sure you get it right and so I’m taking my time with the details of each project we work on.

This isn’t a piece about how much fun it is to do the washing. I shove loads in whenever I can and hope to God that nothing shrinks or is dyed a different colour. My all time favourite cardi recently got caught in a wash that wasn’t meant for it and has now been passed on to my sister’s eighteen month old twins. I’m thirty four years old in August so you can see what damage was done!

Doing the washing can be a pain, especially when a week goes by and Robert & I have totally forgotten that it’s all sitting up there, certainly not washing itself. This then starts a mad rush on a Sunday night by Robert, whereby he has to gather together enough shirts for the week and sit there until the cycle ends. By which time I’ve gone to bed safe and relived in the knowledge that I can pull on a dirty pair of jeans to do my work and nobody will ever say a word.

What I like about this line is the way it does what it says it will with no fuss and leaves me to get on with other things. I can come back to it a little while later and the clothes are dry. They don’t have to be turned over or hung the other way around. Its simple. And seeing as things can often be brimming with complexity and utter bo**ox I will defend my three poles and a line until the end of my days, as I’m certain it will be still be standing, doing exactly what it says on the tin, when I am food for the worms.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

************************************************************