Learning to Launder (the British Way)

English Rain
Photo by Mrs.Timpers via Flickr

I'm sitting here, with hot coffee, reveling in a typically British day. It is misty, often drizzly, but as I don't have to step foot in it today, I'm enjoying it. My daughters are off to school without me, thanks to a wonderful woman who lives near us and works at the junior school my eldest attends. Heaven!

I hear the boy quietly, but obsessively, playing with his motorized Thomas the Tank, a gift from his third birthday a few weeks ago. We actually rode Thomas! More on that in another post.

Domesticity has altered slightly in this new land. I have to get used to a new set of tools, do without some old favorites and attempt to put a routine back into place. As it is Monday, I've got to get the house back in order from the weekend, though I got a jump-start on it yesterday by tidying one daughter's room and marveling in the oldest (7-years-old) doing her own!

It's the laundry that's got me in a bit of a conundrum. I have no dryer. I have a drying contraption that is anchored outdoors - where it is raining and where it rains nearly at least once a day. In the apartment we stayed in for the first two weeks I had a machine that was both washer and dryer. Brilliant British efficiency! It didn't dry very well, but it gave heavier items a good start and I hung them to finish them off.

In the two weeks we've been in the house, after one useless attempt at hanging clothes to dry outdoors, I've gone to draping socks and undies (pants, as they're called here - I've had to train myself to call dress-pants "trousers" so as not to inadvertently talk about underwear in public!) over heated towel bars and radiators and hanging dress shirts, jeans and trousers directly in the closets, doors left open, to dry.

I suppose I'll get the hang of it eventually, no pun intended. In the meantime, I'll be scouring Craigslist and sales adverts for a dryer!

Any tips from dryer-deprived readers?