Drying to make the best of the soggy season
SUNDAY morning and the phone rings around 8am. In your heart of hearts you know that’s never a great time, especially on a day of rest. Trouble, you suspect, lies in wait as soon as you pick up the receiver. It was. Of sorts.
We live near a river. There’s one at the bottom of the garden and the automated message lurking on the other end of our phone was to tell us the river was getting rather full of water, thanks to endless heavy rainfall over the previous couple of days and nights.
We’re no strangers to these messages but are never blasé about them, so being the sort of chap I am I quickly dispatched Mrs Davey in her waterproof hoodie and wellies to the depths of the garden to see whether we really should be “moving our livestock to higher land” as per the usual official instructions.
She was gone some time, returning later to confirm it was not yet cause for any action, that the plastic pop-up gazebo was holding firm but a garden parasol had upended itself and speared some large pots of late geraniums en route to crashing down.
By Monday another early morning automated call confirmed that any risk of a catastrophic Noah’s Flood was over and once again the intrepid adventurer that is my wife returned safely from a further reconnaissance mission. She was able to confirm that everything watery, thankfully, had subsided and that we no longer possessed a small lake-cum-water feature which had appeared uninvited the previous evening.
However, this relentless outpouring from the skies was a sharp and very soggy reminder that the damp season is well and truly upon us, adding another depressing layer to life a la Covid by heightening awareness of our home laundry shortcomings.
That’s because as the long dark evenings and short days arrive our fingers are permanently crossed that we’ll be able to actually hang the washing outdoors to dry. It never happens. Autumn and winter droughts are rarities for us all and in our home we resort to many and variously sized drying racks, located in any spare space that can be found. Eventually, it’s time to give up and use the radiators, draping various articles of clothing, soggy socks and so forth, over them, and consequently turning our cottage into something resembling a gigantic sauna.
It is not good for us or the cottage, of course, but year on year we persist. That situation, however, may be about to change thanks to yours truly.
One of the “benefits” of spending far too much time at home trawling the internet is you unearth marvellous stuff you’d never have previously thought about buying. Which is how I spotted a fascinating domestic helper for sale which promises to be a godsend for dealing with damp laundry.
It was a drying pod which looks rather like an inflatable space rocket. You just pop your damp washing inside, zip it up, switch on and, hey presto, its warm air fan does the rest.
We have sent off for one and, rather childishly, I am as excited about its imminent arrival as I was about the late summer acquisition of our pop-up garden gazebo. Watch this (drying) space!
It’s time to use the radiators to dry soggy socks and so forth ... turning our cottage into something resembling a gigantic sauna
IN conversation with youngest grandchild this week she made mention of Halloween. Until then it had slipped my mind, although I feel the annual October fright night celebration will have to go some to trump this rather more frightful year.
It did set me wondering, though, how traditional trick-ortreating will fare in our current curtailed social life.
The prospect of dealing with a fresh-faced version of The Grim Reaper knocking at your front door demanding goodies – or else – might be just one step too far in 2020.