The truth about ironing

Steamy and dreamy, or dreary drudgery?

Let’s kill this iron.

I can find something to love and loathe about most things, in equal measure. In CONFLICTED, I critique a thing, person, or action – giving each side of the argument a mere 500 words to avoid them becoming wild rants. Sometimes there’s nothing wrong with sitting on the fence – at least you’ve got a seat.

This week: I look at ironing, laundry’s final boss stage, the therapeutic self-care activity that licks the boot of anti-crease conformity.

WHY I HATE IT

It is insane to me that for a period of some years, I burned through one night of every week of my wild and precious twenties by ironing my clothes.

Compared with the rest of my activities at that time – falling out of pubs, taking extended lunch breaks, smoking whole cigarettes in three drags, spending entire weekends sitting cross-legged at parties listening to men called Ross tell me about a rave they dreamed about once – it was quite the contrast, the last vestiges of my entirely square and wholesome teens. The good boy who had all the time in the world to keep a diary.

But I would stand, diligently, robotically, pressing my work shirts and my Diesel Ts and whatever other fashion horrors the start of the century was offering up for sale.

For all its pristine results – which I talk about further down – ironing has a serious image problem. It doesn’t help that it is laundry-adjacent, a rung on the ladder down to hell that on its descent visits clothes airers, overstuffed laundry baskets, and washing machines with mouldy seals. We speak of ‘piles’ of laundry, the second-most hated genre of pile after haemorrhoids.

We consider the humble iron a symbol of drudgery, and female oppression, the feminist publishing company The Women’s Press even featured an iron – ironically – as its icon on the spines of its books. Ironing is a grind, the adult version of being given lines by a sadistic schoolmaster, and it invites you to hate it.

I’ve ironed 1,800 overalls today. I want to ram this thing into my face and black out.

To iron well is a skill nobody would ever congratulate you on, but to iron badly (or not at all) is somehow a source of shame, if not for yourself then the parent (or partner) who insists your creases are a personal affront, as if you are going on live television and claiming they Joan Crawforded you.

Even if you are good at ironing, the dreaded contraption, selected from a lineup in the Argos catalogue – each thumbnail pic as inspiring as supermarket sushi – back before 8 Out of 10 Cats started doing Countdown specials, finds ways of ruining your day.

There is the unpredictable tantrum-vomit of brown, gritty, malodorous water, usually when you’re ironing a porcelain white shirt that you need to wear immediately. Consider also its compulsion to cling to whatever fragile fabric you’ve run under its steely grooves, or the uselessness of a cool iron on anything.

Irons are as varying in temperament as Big Brother contestants, too. Become acclimatised to your own iron’s quirks too smugly and it will decide to expire, leaving you fumbling with a pricier, dumber replacement.

Expert presser as I am, any attempt to use an iron that’s not my own makes me feel like Uncle Buck drying socks in the microwave. An unfamiliar iron tears away decades’ worth of domestic mastery and renders me a hopeless bachelor, with a fridge full of ready meals and underpants with days of the week inscribed on the front. Creases for ever!

Cor, look at the linen setting on that.

WHY I LOVE IT

What music it is to the ears, sweeter than disco on a Quaalude buzz on a light-up dance floor in 1970s New York, to hear the iron hiss with efficiency and purr with delight as it glides over your fast fashion separates. Like an LNER Azuma train slicing through the countryside with butter-knife precision, the iron is smooth and unstoppable, boldly going where no overpriced steamer or drip-dry washing line would ever go, in pursuit of the creases that would destroy your reputation.

It’s incredible to me that I barely ironed throughout my thirties and some of my forties, that I would pull a T-shirt out of my un-Marie Kondo’d fit-to-bursting drawers and yank it over my pasty body and leave the house looking like I’d slept at the bottom of a budgerigar’s cage. To imagine that ironing is solely about sending creases to death row is to master only a tiny part of the puzzle. Ironing is, to borrow an overused, if well-meaning, 21st century cliché, self-care. And garment care, obviously.

Clothes that have undergone a quick bout of ironing therapy have exorcised their demons, they feel loved, and appreciated. Not only do they, if you slip them on immediately, bear the heat of the iron’s ardour but even the scratchiest of fabrics have had the sting from their tail removed. An iron pushes the material to make room for your body, it feels smooth and tender as it skims your contours. In an ironed piece of clothing, you feel like you made an effort when, really, it is no effort at all.

Me getting ready for my romantic date with a Tefal Duraglide – we are going to Flatiron, obviously.

The idea of ironing – so long as you’re taking the hit voluntarily and for your own benefit – is always worse than the actual doing, and it’s so worth it. Unless I am going away or know I’ll be busy when I need to wear the items, I iron on-demand now, rather than curate a closet of ready-to-wear pressed classics. Yet catch me in the right mood and I might find myself roaming back to the wardrobe or routing in a drawer for something else to iron, such is my enjoyment.

A sad little life, Jane, perhaps, but in a world where satisfaction is scant and events seem beyond one’s control, an unexpected half-hour swirling the iron over mixed cottons is a pleasure and a delight. The mechanical order of it. Sleeves, shoulders, collar, back, front, weaving through the buttons, reaching for the hanger, tussling slightly while arranging, then stand back and admire.

I sometimes think calling mundane chores ‘therapeutic’ is our way of excusing the fact we’re not embarking on allegedly more adventurous activities like spending a wet Tuesday coked out of our domes or being a digital nomad in a Lithuanian yoga retreat or something, but there is, dare I say, a glint of mindfulness in a session at the ironing board.

Tackle a denim shirt on a cold winter’s night with a full tank of water in a high-capacity steam iron and you will know nirvana, my child.

MORE FROM ME:

I reviewed the Guardian Blind Date, which was two guys, thank goodness. 🌈 They got off with each other. YAY. READ NOW

My fourth novel LEADING MAN is still very lovely, I reckon, and is a bit like one of these newsletters except around 90,000 words long. If you like this, you will like that too. BUY NOW

This newsletter was inspired by my father, who said to me at the weekend, ‘I used to quite enjoy ironing a denim shirt, it’s very satisfying’. (I was ironing a denim shirt at the time; he didn’t just blurt it out.) He was indeed right. Happy birthday, Dad. x

All images come from Tefal iron adverts from the 1980s and 1990s.