Forget fast cars and multiple properties – dry cleaning is the greatest extravagance
There is plenty about modern life to cause celebration and aggravation in equal measure. Thankfully, old hand Christopher Howse and young gun Guy Kelly are here to dissect the way we live now...
I’ve just been surprised. It does happen, and can make me spill my tea. In the present case it was because I had never focused on what the surname Walker meant. Like (Mrs) Thatcher or (Wat) Tyler, Walker is obviously an occupation name. You don’t get paid for walking, however, unless you pound cloth with your feet (to clean it and make it cohere). I had heard recordings of women’s work songs as they went about this procedure, which I thought was spelt waulking.
That, though, is just one Scottish variant spelling. The Reverend Robert Walker, ‘The Skating Minister’ in Henry Raeburn’s popular picture from the later 18th century, like other Walkers, must have been descended from someone who followed the fuller’s trade of walking cloth. That was the surprise.
Surprise surprised me when I was trying to find out how dry cleaning works. I had begun to suspect that it doesn’t really. After a great slump during that pandemic we had, dry cleaning is on the up again, and often your new togs will say ‘dry clean only’.
Yet dry cleaning is expensive, ineffectual and harmful to clothes. The dry cleaner’s solvent is supposed to dissolve dirt that’s bound to the fabric, without making fibres curl up tightly, like viewers of an interview with Prince Andrew. Then the solvent is filtered before being reused. I think that it’s here that the process must sometimes fail, with the equivalent effect as the family bathwater on the seventh child to share it.
I did read about the value of spraying clothes with vodka. I thought it might be an April Fool. Then I thought it wasn’t. My state of mind was like that of the respected logician Gottlob Frege, to whom it sometimes seemed that numbers weren’t objects. And then it seemed to him that they were.
The vodka spray is not meant to get rid of stains but smells. It’s an old theatre trick. But so is catching a bullet in your teeth. The vodka evaporates, having vanquished bacteria, apparently. I’d like to hear if readers have succeeded at this, without being breathalysed or bursting into flames.
Whenever he’s asked that tired old question, ‘What’s your greatest extravagance?’, the actor Bill Nighy replies: ‘Dry cleaning.’ And I respect Bill for that. If I were a rich and famous actor, I’d likely be the same.
You can keep your exotic properties, fast cars and glamorous company. There is no more decadent activity, no more ecstatic high, than simply having something dry cleaned. Just the phrase ‘dry clean only’ makes me quiver.
The whole experience is deliriously chic. In you go, balled-up suit in hand, bell on the door trilling, to be greeted at the counter by a nonplussed laundry wizard of discretion. Behind, hang racks and racks of clothes, each garment a story, their modesty sheathed by a nylon overcoat, their elegant movements controlled by a softly whirring conveyor.
The wizard doesn’t ask how bad a particular stain might be; nor do they care how it happened. They just know you need that thing looking pristine, and pronto. So they take the suit, disappear it, mutter ‘pay on collection’, and hand you a pink receipt made of an eerily coarse paper seemingly only supplied to their industry.
Part of the reason I love it is because I don’t understand it. What is going on back there? How is it dry? I could ask, but the best magic tricks should be left unspoilt. Sometimes you don’t want to see how the sausage is ironed. You just want to get home and feel the shudder-inducing joy of tearing that plastic off like a bodice in a Johanna Lindsey novel.
Not having the means of a man who starred as a cephalopod-head in Pirates of the Caribbean, I don’t get to experience this regularly. But when I do, my usual is a south London mother-son-cat joint.
A few years ago, I visited to have some trousers altered. Lacking a changing room, they invited me behind the counter and moved the conveyor around to improvise a private alcove within the thicket of suspended synthetic ghosts. In that moment, alone and half-naked, encased by dry-cleaned clothes, I was momentarily inside the magic. I still think about it. I’m not sure I’ve ever been happier.
So yeah, Bill, I hear you.
