“Would it be weird to get new pegs for Christmas?”
This is a text I received recently from a dear friend and former flatmate. I have a vivid memory of us in our 20s getting ready for a night out, she putting on a pair of very damp tights and me going at her legs with a hairdryer. We would routinely forget loads of laundry in the washing machine and have to give them another spin before hanging the still slightly musty items up on banjaxed clothes horses in the shared living space. With a third flatmate on the go, there were always jeans and bras and T-shirts vying for space.
My friend has since graduated to a house with a little garden on Dublin’s northside, and her washing line is her pride and joy. With small children and a constant rotation of tiny socks, swimsuits and endless outfits, bedsheets and towels it’s not surprising she has her heart set on “an Australian brand called Hegs with apparently are life-changing”. I told her, without hesitation, to “get those pegs, girl”.
If one of our national catchphrases supposedly revolves around the fact that there’s ‘great drying out’, why are we so determined to curtail it?
I’ve graduated to my own apartment too. It doesn’t have a garden, per se, but it does have a largeish patio thanks to the luck of bagging a ground-floor rental. The patio doesn’t get much sun and is chronically overlooked by countless neighbours four floors above and all around me so I use it for what any red-blooded Irish woman would use it for: drying clothes. I started with placing my non-banjaxed clothes horses out there to catch the wind and the hour or two of sun before rigging up a washing line of my own. During the pandemic I even sourced a hooshing pole to achieve maximum aeration (a hooshing pole is one that leverages the ground to hike the line up as high as possible. It may have an official name, but I cannot imagine one that describes its usage more accurately than hooshing pole).
There’s great drying out. Unless you live in an Irish apartment
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The problem is – and it’s the same problem that’s existed since I started renting flats, often mouldy and dripping in condensation, 25 years ago – is that the development I live in doesn’t allow for laundry to be dried outside. No balcony clothes horses, no patio washing lines. Despite being a lifelong lickarse, this is one rule that I have always turned a blind eye to. I was raised in a house where clean laundry was a love language. My mother remains devoted to air-drying clothes on large lines across our back garden. The smell of freshly washed sheets having a final stint on centrally heated radiators will always be the smell of home. It feels sacrilegious then to crowd items on to clothes horses in small flats in front of baffling – why are they so baffling? – storage heaters.
Tenants in my development recently received a reminder about our “balcony responsibilities”, among them that washing must not be hung out on balconies or patios or from windows as “unsightly items” are not permitted. Well, to say I gasped! A beautiful line of washing, unsightly?! An eco-friendly and damp-unfriendly method of carrying out one of the most basic sanitary habits, unpermitted?!
Before the lickarses rise up, yes, this is all outlined in lease agreements. Yes, the landlord has fulfilled their legal duty by providing a washer dryer (but I have yet to meet a washer dryer that knows anything about drying). However, this issue – driven, I believe by classist snobbery and Celtic Tiger-esque obsessions with appearances – is one that raises such ire that there was a proposed Labour amendment to the Residential Tenancies Act in 2021 to allow clothes to be hung to dry on balconies and in gardens, as is common in other European cities. In California a landlord is required by law to let tenants use outdoor spaces to dry laundry. Here in Ireland property management companies seem wedded to ludicrous standards about what is and isn’t acceptable to be seen. Apartment block after apartment block is built with no thought given to green and outdoor spaces, or, where they are provided, they are policed or blocked off.
[ Putting it all on the line: How to air dry your clothes in all weather conditionsOpens in new window ]
If one of our national catchphrases supposedly revolves around the fact that there’s “great drying out”, why are we so determined to curtail it? Why are management companies allowed to dictate what a resident does with their private space, when gardens attached to houses are not regulated in the same manner? I’d like to see anyone try to take the washing line and the new Christmas Hegs away from my friend. From her cold, dead hands.