Open Writing

I must confess that the electric iron and I have never been the best of friends.

In fact we have been total strangers since the day , fifty five years ago, when I badly scorched the sleeve of my uniform shortly before the RAF and I parted company near the end of my two years national service.

But recently, having reached the age of 75, I decided that maybe it was time to get better acquainted. My long-suffering wife Nancy , who never misses the opportunity of reminding me – and anyone else who cares to listen – that we started out our married life forty-six years ago with her washing and ironing eighteen shirts and pressing my cricket flannels which I had brought with me from my digs, agreed wholeheartedly.

I was about to bring a whole new meaning to the phrase, getting hot under the collar. Nine of my shirts had been washed and tumble-dried (not by me I might add ) and were hanging up ready to be ironed. First some important information had to be elicited from my wife. “Darling”, I ventured, “Where do we keep our ironing board?”

You notice the “our”. Well as we jointly own the house and everything in it half the ironing board was mine, even though I had never used it.

Ironing board now in place. Now, of course, I needed the steam iron.(Same ownership rules apply) “Darling, where do we keep our iron”, I ventured again. A minute or so later ironing board and iron are together. I knew of course that in order to produce steam I had to put water into the iron. It didn’t take me more than a couple of minutes to figure out that the water went into a round opening at the back of the iron – or was it the front? – before I plugged the iron into the wall socket.

Anyway I must have got it right because within seconds the iron was sizzling and I was ready to begin. Now what bit do I do first? “Sleeves first, then the right hand side, then the back, then the left hand side and finally the collar and the area just below it”, commanded Nancy. That was the battle plan she had always followed, the way her mum had taught her, though I’ve now carried out some research and find that opinion varies among some of my well-trained male friends about which is the correct order.

I soon realised that I was putting more creases into the sleeve than were already there.

And working the iron in between the buttons on the front of the shirt was a painstaking and frustrating job, not helped, of course, by keeping one eye on the James Bond TV thriller Golden Eye. Well you’ve got to somehow occupy yourself doing a de-pressing job like ironing.

My wife tells me that when she was at Royds Hall (it was a grammar school then) not long after the last war, she went home and told her mum that the domestic science teacher had told the class that it should take ten minutes to iron a shirt.

“Tell your teacher if I took that long I’d still be ironing your dad’s shirts until midnight”, she laughed. Remember, steam irons were not introduced until the early 1950s and Nancy recalls that it probably took her mum three or four minutes for each shirt and that time included having to sprinkle water on to it from a bowl.

I reckon it must have taken me three or four minutes just to do each sleeve and one and a half hours later I flopped exhausted into the nearest chair having decreased in varying degrees all nine shirts, and roundly cursing Henry Seely of New York City. I’ve never met the fellow because he’s been dead many years.

His claim to fame – or infamy as far as my henpecked mates are concerned – is that he invented the electric flat iron in 1882. So he’s one man they won’t be raising their glasses to.

But as I was dashing away with the smoothing iron I had a thought. Maybe I could earn myself a few bob with this ironing lark. I could organise a competition to find Britain’s fastest and most efficient male shirt ironer. Of course there would be quite a few problems to iron out (if you’ll excuse the pun) not least of which would be who would promote and pay the organising costs.

We could run a heat (boom, boom) in every town up and down the country with regional finals and a grand final in London to find “Mr Steam Iron 2008”. But then I thought, its not a title that exactly trips off the tongue. And who would want the title anyway.

So maybe it isn’t such a good idea after all. Anyway I’ve scrapped it and now I’m going back to the drawing board, or should that be ironing board?