Separate your whites

Last weekend, I went to the laundromat. We don't have a dryer, you see. So, I took my damp towels and bed sheets, I put them in the boot of my car and drove them about ten minutes from my house to the nearby laundromat with the best parking.

I never had cause to visit a laundromat until I left home, at the ripe age of seventeen. After my initial move "out" to board with a friend, I moved again, this time "in", with a boy who was all wrong for what were at the time, all the right reasons.

It was then that I found myself down the road with my baskets of wet laundry for the first time.

Perhaps strangely, the laundromat is a place that I find grounding. There is something about the activity of washing and drying your clothing and manchester in a communal setting...it is humble and simple. It's necessary. It takes me back to basics.

You see people from all walks of life at the laundromat. They are careful to separate their whites from their darks and their brights, but in the process of the sorting and cleaning they reveal a range of colours, and I'm not just referring to their underwear.

I saw a girl take a chair and post herself right in front of the dryer she was using, as if to stand guard of her socks. If someone intended to perform daylight sock robbery she was ready to take them down. She sat right on the edge of her chair. No-one was getting past her. Of course, there was no-one so daring or perverse, at least not while I was there. But it was clear that she felt the need to protect what was hers.

There are those who are polite, even helpful; like the man I saw opening the door for people and warning them that the dryer on the end was swallowing coins in exchange for naught but a few spins of cold air.

And there is always at least one noisy, attention-seeking person. The one who has to take a phone call while stuffing their washer to announce their most recent personal problem over the hum of the machines. All the while, their children run riot around patient others who are mid-chapter of a novel they have been dying to get to all week.

Their laundry speaks volumes about who they are, what they do. From flamboyant frills to baby jumpsuits and Calvin Klein y-fronts, doilies and stained sheets, the innards of life spill out over the tops of cane and plastic baskets.

Like no other time, except perhaps when you need a toilet stop at Picadilly station, is it as important to have the right change. If you don't, you will have to take a walk, purchase something from the milk bar and make a polite request for dollar coins. You will need to pretend that the man selling the milk does not really know why you have asked for the coins and then casually disregard the sign that says, "we do not provide change for the laundromat", smoothing the awkward moment with your nicest manners and a dazzling flash of white teeth.

How much time you get for a dollar is anybody's guess, a secret known only to whomever hides in the booth behind the wall of industrial machines, under lock and key.

Somehow, watching my towels turn around and around in the dryer is soothing to me. The sound and the motion is repetitive, like being on a train. The dryer exudes a comforting heat. You are forced to stop still and stare while it cycles. It's a mesmerizing fabric evolution.

Over the years I have changed laundromats, sure. I have moved house about a dozen times. Being laundro-loyal is simply not pragmatic. But taking this basic, in-house event down the street reminds me that the inner workings of our day-to-day lives are very common. We are not alone. Each week, at some point we will all stand by a basket, sorting and folding, shaking our heads at the occasional white sock gone pink or an accidentally shrunken garment.

These basic threads, they weave us together.