Suds

Back from working my way through a mountain of dirty clothes at the laundromat this afternoon. The inconvenience of not having our own machines is noted, but still, I’ve always found something oddly pleasing in the ritual trek. It’s made all the more significant when almost everything wearable one owns begins dirty and winds up clean, folded and ready for action.

There’s a sense of quiet contemplation in a laundromat — and this has been my experience wherever I’ve lived — that’s very appealing. One gets a couple of hours effective privacy, whilst sharing in a commonality of purpose. It — yes, I can hear you out there thinking this — almost has the shape of a religious observance. In that one emerges cleansed, it’s a confessional of sorts. It’s also a meditation: a drift with Dreft. And it flattens societal strata into a single, simple class.

It sometimes reminds me of Casualty, in a way that might make no sense at all. The programme is only ostensibly about medical matters. It’s really about injury as the catalyst for catharsis. Lives are serendipitously pushed to crisis by injury and the pieces are thrown into chaos, from which trees the wood finally begins to emerge. Relationships are rescued; long-overdue decisions are taken with fresh energy. Mutatis very much mutandis, I imagine the same being true of a laundromat setting. Where Casualty is about the washing of metaphorical dirty laundry, in my laundromat show — call it Suds — things get fixed by washing real laundry. Hey, who needs a metaphor when you’ve got the real thing. And which of us doesn’t feel better about life with a drawer full of clean underwear. See?