Saturday 11 December 2010

On the Pleasure of Ironing


Many Buddhists claim that the performance of mundane, everyday tasks can help them on their eightfold path to enlightenment. I am not a Buddhist myself, but I when I contemplate ironing, that most heavenly of pleasures, I can see how they may be right.

I currently have a huge pile of ironing dumped in my room. Shirts, trousers, jumpers – almost all of the garments I own – are crumpled on my bed. However, I regard this prospect not with a vague sense of futility and reluctance, but with a frission of anticipation that may make you uneasy.

The first pleasure of ironing is derived from the satisfaction one gets from the careful marshalling of the linen, cotton or silk that is required to expertly purge the garment’s creasing. Any idiot can iron, say, a scarf (if they felt so inclined), with its simple straightness. However, in order to get the sleeves, collars, cuffs, hems and bodies of shirts done nicely, one needs to judiciously and tenderly fold and tug the material into the correct position to iron, otherwise one ends up going over folds and creases and making them worse. This gradual process of easing the material into the right position has a skill and a subtlety to it that makes successful ironing a genuine pleasure – it’s like systematically and clinically peeling a piece of fruit to leave the tender, raw flesh underneath naked and exposed.

The second pleasure is the sensual side. If one uses fragrant ironing water, one’s room becomes filled with the smell of blueberry or jasmine, summer fruits or lily; all of the sweet aromas of the English country garden or orchard brought to you via the industrial steel plates of one’s iron. One’s clothes are softer to the touch, more yielding and balmy, after the caress of one’s trusty steam machine. Nothing beats lying on sheets and bedclothes that have recently been ironed – it produces an unmistakable and irreproducible sensation of freshness and crispness.

Ironing’s other attractions are more psychological. I find much of my existence spent in a state of anxiety about the possibility that I am wasting my life. The ticking of the second hand of the clock thuds into one’s guts the sense that moments spent idling are morally unacceptable wastes of the limited and irreplaceable commodity of time. However, I find this vague and unsettling anxiety assuaged, soothed, even eliminated, by ironing. I find that having completed an ironing session my conscience is settled. I feel that I have not wasted my time, that whatever else I should or could have been doing – writing that definitive biography of Kierkegaard, say, or composing that piano concerto – I would still have had to do the ironing, and therefore I did not iron in vain. Unlike watching the TV or surfing the internet or whatever other mundane tasks one fills one’s life with, it never feels like time wasted, empty or sterile.

This is linked to the fact that ironing is an inherently civilised thing to do. Humans should live clean and hygienic lives. We must clean our clothes. The act of cleaning our clothes makes them creased and untidy, and in order to look respectable they must be ironed. To not do so would be a deviation from civilised behaviour, a sign that one cannot be bothered to uphold decency. The act of ironing is, therefore, never an unproductive use of a couple of hours. It feels to me that if not done, it is another little sign of a society slipping away from firm and common standards, like when people talk loudly about how much they earn or refuse to give up their seat on the bus to an elderly person. I think that the final descent into anarchy or a post-apocalyptic wasteland would, whatever else it heralded, be marked, perhaps most tellingly of all, by the decline of ironing.

Ironing is also a sober and educational act. Although it requires a kind of intuitive skill that is satisfying to practice, it leaves much of one’s conscious mind to other things. As a result, one can listen to the radio or watch a documentary whilst ironing. I have listened to countless editions of ‘In Our Time’ and ‘Brain of Britain’ whilst ironing, in which time I have learnt more than an Oxbridge education ever taught me. One can also think and reflect. Many of my best ideas have occurred to me whilst stoking the steam. Because of this possibility of learning or creating while ironing, the activity becomes doubly significant. Not only is one upholding civilisation by the very act of ironing itself, but one can imbibe knowledge or cogitate at the same time. It is time twice over, time deepened and enriched to a degree almost impossible to imagine in connection with any other activity.

So, to all of you who don’t iron, or see it as a chore, you are missing a subtle and unique pleasure. Your life will be enriched greatly by bearing in mind that to err is human, to iron divine.

Wednesday 1 December 2010

No to Noel: Why Christmas is like pissing in a urinal

My disillusion with Christmas was a relatively sudden process. Within the space of one or two Christmases it went from being an exciting, comfortable, looked-forward-to occasion to being, frankly, a pain in the arse. Now, I inwardly cringe every year from about mid-November, when the first garish displays appear in the shop and you start to hear Rudolph the sodding Red-nosed Reindeer everywhere you go.

Now, I know what you’re thinking – bah humbug! What a miserable bugger I must be, whinging about the time of peace to the world and goodwill to all men. However, I maintain that there a number of entirely valid reasons to hate Christmas that go beyond the usual lazy soul-searching about its commercialisation.

My first and probably biggest problem with Christmas is the way it introduces an air of forced and sometimes inappropriate jollity to everything. At Christmas, everyone is expected to have a good time, be cheerful and enjoy themselves. This atmosphere of expectation kills any prospect of fun for me. Humour, joy and tenderness will never result if you try to force them – they “simply occur”, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde. It’s a bit like trying to piss in a gents’ toilet. The fact that the blokes at the neighbouring urinals are dimly aware of whether you are successfully having a slash or not makes actually performing the act remarkably difficult, as most men who are not blithely unselfaware morons will have noticed.

That the expectation of performance makes performance all the more difficult is not a blindingly original observation. However, it deserves to be pointed out that this problem is compounded in the case of Christmas by the stubborn facts of reality. The vicissitudes of life are unpredictable, and there is no way of guaranteeing that Christmas will not occur at a difficult or challenging time, when all of the plastic, manufactured cheeriness and ‘goodwill’ chafes particularly painfully. Anyone who has had a close family member or friend die near Christmas will testify to this. I remember attending the funeral of a friend held in early January who died around Christmas time. The timing lent it a particularly plaintive and miserable quality. When one knows that one is expected to be happy and cheerful but feels merely despair, the contrast makes the unhappiness all the more difficult to bear.

I remember this particularly during the Christmas that immediately followed my parents’ divorce. My mother had taken the divorce and its circumstances extremely (and understandably) badly. The isolation that she felt that Christmas made enjoying Christmas impossible. What made it all the worse was that she felt guilty about not being cheerful for me, which in turn made her despair even more. It didn’t do much for my levels of merriment either.

There are other reasons to dislike Christmas. Firstly, most heathens like me will feel vaguely bemused by the fact that, although Christmas is a Christian festival, it is culturally engrained that everyone will celebrate it regardless of their actual beliefs. I do not believe that Christ is our saviour who will absolve our sins, and I do not set any store at all by the occasion of the (supposed) anniversary of his birth. However, if I ignored it completely – if I never bought anyone presents, pretended that 25th December is just another day – I would be seen as acting very strangely indeed. Some smart-alecs have in the past suggested to me that as a consistent atheist, I should do just this and ignore Christmas, not even participating in any of its semi-secular rituals like the tree, Christmas pudding or presents. Glib and consistent though this argument is, it is clearly impossible to altogether avoid Christmas within the context of British society and existing social relationships without making life fairly difficult for oneself and probably offending some people whom one loves. So, most atheists have to half-heartedly go through the motions and pretend that Christmas has some significance to avoid greater inconveniences, or else unashamedly confess that Christmas is just a thinly-veiled excuse for everyone to eat and drink too much, which makes the whole thing a very shallow and faintly depressing affair. As for those of other faiths, I expect that Christmas for them must be a pretty tricky affair in Britain, since any small Hindu or Muslim child is going to be naturally baffled, given their likely lack of appreciation of the finer points of religious division, as to why almost all of their peers are receiving presents and having a good time when they are not

Furthermore, Christmas seems to illustrate human folly and cruelty particularly sharply. It is meant to be a time of good-will and peace, when existing wars or injustices temporarily pause. The guns on the Western Front cease, the homeless are treated in a slightly more human way for a day, and so on. Surely, however, all this does is illustrate how absurd and unforgivable human social and political organisation is for the rest of the year? If it takes Christmas for people to stop butchering each other or for people to give a second thought to the desperate, the homeless, and the poor, then what does that say about most people? It seems self-evident to me that all human beings have a duty to act with decency consistently, not merely because they happen to remember, for one day a year, that morality, you know, actually exists. It’s almost as if man’s inhumanity to man is fine, so long as one has the good manners to refrain for a few days around the time when Christ was supposedly born, it being a little gratuitous to juxtapose the (supposed) Christian message of loving kindness so very blatantly with the hypocrisies of our existing societies.

In short, Christmas seems to me to illustrate the painful contradictions of our culture in a stark way. The cheerful expect those with fairly valid reasons to be miserable to suddenly snap out it. Non-Christians have little choice but to adapt and pay lip-service to the celebration of something that they do not believe in, or risk making themselves unpopular or hurting others’ feelings. Those who endorse war and poverty cry crocodile tears for a day over the injustices they do nothing to ameliorate, and a lot to prolong, the other 364 days a year.

Please, fast-forward me to January now...