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.