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The pressing question: should you iron your tea towels (and underwear, for that matter)?

'There is nothing more satisfying than the effortless ploughing of a smooth path through a crumpled linen sheet with my favourite household appliance'
'There is nothing more satisfying than the effortless ploughing of a smooth path through a crumpled linen sheet with my favourite household appliance'

TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp and I have little in common. She has two large houses, knits her own bunting and has a penchant for floral dresses. I do not.

But this week I discovered we both share a belief in the therapeutic joys of ironing. Twitter followers scoffed at her proud pictures of pressed tea towels, while I looked at the before and after shots of her ironing pile with the admiration and envy usually reserved for weight-loss boasts.

Kirstie and I are part of a tribe for whom the phrase to iron out life’s problems is taken literally.

At first my ironing habit was a shameful secret, given that it started, in retro housewife style, with my husband’s work shirts almost two decades ago. Before long I’d spent a three-figure sum on a fancy steam-generator iron – an unwieldy robot with the dimensions of a large Christmas turkey.

There is nothing more satisfying than the effortless ploughing of a smooth path through a crumpled linen sheet with my favourite household appliance. As my face gets ever more wrinkled, my iron performs instant Botox on the pillow cases.

Twitter was full of “Who irons tea towels?” posts, but I agree with Kirstie that they are the most joyful item in the ironing basket. It takes all of 30 seconds to take the tatty cloth with bad drawings of a child’s reception class and turn it into a crisp rectangle of order.

There are so few pleasures in lockdown, why would I forgo this one? And getting into a bed made with crisp linen sheets has always been one of life’s happier moments; we all need to find these where we can.

With everyone working from home in elasticated sportswear, ironing opportunities have sadly been reduced. My husband’s gone from five or six shirts a week to one and insists it only needs a Zoom-friendly collar and front done.

Home schooling has denied me the kids’ uniform shirts, even if they were supposed to be non-iron in the first place. Fortunately, face masks have arrived to provide a whole new avenue of endeavour – I favour some artisanal linen ones from Plümo that look like an elephant’s ear until I get going on them.

We have a glorified cupboard/lavatory that I pretentiously call the laundry room like I live in Downton Abbey, and it’s become my equivalent of a man-shed. Locked in there with a good podcast, I’m insulated from the less controllable aspects of family life. The other side of the door children bicker, weird snacks are made, wi-fi connections fail in crucial meetings and the dog trails mud across carpets. Ironing feels like an acceptable way to retreat from the chaos of our household.

Ironing tea-towels might seem like a sure sign of domestic obsessiveness, but I’m not house-proud in any other room. I have noticed amongst my friends it is the more slatternly who develop an ironing addiction, as a displacement activity rather than doing anything useful.

Properly domestic people are too busy stopping the rising tide of filth to bother with a shirt’s yoke or steaming a T-shirt on a hanger.

A friend with five children has invested in a rotary iron, a professional level mangle into which you feed sheets. Disarray abounds elsewhere while she obsesses over her bedsheets.

I’ve now got my eye on the purchase of one of the garment steamers that I admired being used in clothes shops back when we were allowed in them.

Younger people I know have an “if it needs ironing I don’t buy it” attitude, but I’m not sure it’s a generational thing so much as a thing you age into. I didn’t even own an iron until I was in my 30s and would have scoffed at such a bourgeois behaviour. Neither is there a gender divide since the most heated debate I’ve had on the subject has been with a man who disputed the shirt-ironing order (collar, yoke, cuffs, sleeves, torso. Obviously).

In lockdown, my house looks like a teenager’s bedroom now there are no visitors to shame us into tidying it, yet amid the chaos our sheets, tea towels and even cleaning cloths are pressed to perfection. While others are doing less ironing than usual, I’m turning to it as one of the few things that give me a sense of achievement. I draw the line, though, at underwear. Ironing pants and socks would be too weird. Then again, maybe if I could persuade my husband to swap to cotton boxers…

Read more: The gospel of good housekeeping, according to Kirstie Allsopp


‘I’ve ironed once in 10 years’

By Flic Everett

Of all household chores, ironing seems the most pointless to me. Perhaps once, when everything was made of thick hemp and tired linen, it was necessary to avoid going out looking like a bag of dust-cloths. But now, with polyester mixes and Lycra and tech, you can put the tumble drier on “hot” and pull out any item crumple-free. Even line-drying results in wearable clothes – a little stiff, perhaps, but not enough to start steaming and filling the house with clouds of scorched-smelling mist.

Ironing involves setting up a board like Norman Wisdom unfolding a deckchair (Google it, youngsters), filling a leaky iron with water, and standing upright for hours, bashing away at creases with a lump of burning hot metal. Then you put your shirt on and, two minutes later, it’s rumpled again.

This is why I never iron – apart from once in the past decade, when people were coming for dinner and the tablecloth looked like the Turin shroud after a storm. I spent half an hour spraying water and cursing, and it still wasn’t properly smooth at the end of it.

I always store my clothes properly and I can’t say I notice any unsightly wrinkles when I get dressed.

Ironing is like handwashing: an archaic practice that should be consigned to a past era, when we had nothing better to do.

Five of the best ironing aids across the board
Merch panel
Merch panel
  1. The Funky Appliance Company Pressurised Steam Iron, £79.99, Amazon

  2. Amber Glass Spray Bottle (500ml), £3.99, Eco Vibe

  3. Laundress Classic Ironing Water (475ml), £15.50, Harrods

  4. Sterling silver collar stiffeners, £110, Huntsman

  5. Melcombe Ironing Shelf, £55, Garden Trading