A letter from a reader

For years I kept a towel on the landing whose only job was to go over the washing basket

I should say up front that I am 66 and that laundry baskets have never once been a subject I had thoughts about. This is not my usual sort of correspondence. But three separate people have now asked me about mine, and saying it a fourth time out loud seemed sillier than writing it down.

It started with my neighbour Ruth, who came in to borrow a colander and stopped halfway up the stairs.

Sally. What is that.

She meant the washing basket. I have known Ruth eleven years and the first thing in this house she has ever remarked on is where I keep the towels.

The towel

To explain why Ruth asking made me laugh, I have to own up to something I had never said out loud.

On the landing windowsill there was a folded towel. It was a perfectly good towel and it was never used for drying anything. Its entire job was to go over the top of the washing basket when the doorbell went, so that whoever was at the door would not have to see a plastic hamper with a split down one side and a week of shirts coming out of the top of it.

I had been doing that for so long I had stopped noticing I was doing it. It was the same reflex as putting the good biscuits out.

It took me until 66 to work out that I was covering things up in my own house, from people I had invited.

What I had never added up

I had it filed away under things that are not worth an opinion. It holds socks. Who is making a handsome one of those, and what sort of person would spend money on it.

But here is the sum I had never done. That basket stands on the landing three hundred and sixty-five days a year, at the top of the stairs, in the exact spot my eye goes every time I come up. I look at it more often than I look at anything hanging on my walls. The pictures get chosen and dusted, and the thing I actually see gets to be cracked grey plastic from 2014.

The things that are out every day have earned as much consideration as the ones we put on a shelf and polish.

Mine is the highland cow

They come from The Winslow Sisters, the small shop in Richmond that Emma and Alison have run for eleven years, and there are about thirty of them.

Mine has a highland cow on it, the shaggy ginger sort, standing in a field of white daisies that runs the whole way round the basket, so there is no back and no wrong way to stand it. The body is a soft quilted fabric with the stitching following the picture, and there is a folded cream cuff at the top that turns over like a sock. Written down that sounds like a great deal of basket. In the corner of a landing it just looks like something somebody chose.

Three things worth knowing

One. It stands up by itself. Empty, half full, or piled over the top on the day I strip the beds. Every soft basket I had owned before folded into a sad heap in the corner within about a month, which is how they all end up in the shed.

Two. The sizes make sense. There is a small that fits beside a bath, a medium for a bedroom, and a large that will take everything off four beds at once. I have the medium and it holds a week of mine without any trouble.

Three. It is not precious. It gets carried, overfilled, dumped on and splashed. The handles are stitched canvas and anchored right through the body, so I take a full load downstairs in one go rather than making two journeys, and when I slopped wet towels down the side of it, it wiped straight off.

What it cost

I am careful with money and I would rather say so than pretend. The small is £29.95 and the large is £39.95. They were £89.

When something useful halves in price I want to know what the catch is. In this case it is ordinary enough. They sell direct from a small shop, so there is no wholesaler standing between the two of us adding a margin, and they would rather clear the run now than store it until spring. Emma has written her own piece about why there are thirty pictures instead of three, and she is honest that thirty is an expensive way to do it. It is here if you like knowing that sort of thing.

One thing before I stop

Go upstairs and have a proper look at your washing basket. If what goes through your mind when the door goes is to move it, or drape something over it, or pull a door shut on it, then you have a towel of your own and you know precisely what this letter is about.

I am not going to tell you a laundry basket changes your week. It does not. What it changes is the dozen small moments a day when your eye lands on something you settled for, and swaps them for something you actually decided on. That turns out to be worth more than I would have guessed from the outside. The towel has been back in the airing cupboard since March.