I unpacked my sparkly (not really) new flannel sheets last night, and immediately understood why they advise you to wash them before use. It’s not the excess dye that’ll get you, it’s the Pakistani cloth factory smell that comes with them (and at no extra cost). So I carried them to the washing-machine, popped them in, put in some soap, started her up, then merely seconds later, spotted the pillowcase that had been dropped along the way. It’s a front-loading machine, which of course means that in this situation, swearing may occur.

Blarg. Swore a bit, set the machine to the spin part of the cycle, waited for it to empty, put the pillowcase in, a bit more soap, then started again.

To the ironing then. Set up the ironing board (it seems to make an inordinate amount of squeaky noise when I fold or unfold it), got out the iron, found my shirts for ironing. WTF? Two of the four had strange stains on them. But they had just been washed. Blarg. Swore a bit more, threw the guilty two back in the laundry pile, kept on ironing.

And got back to watching the Sopranos from last Tuesday night. I wonder if it was prompting me to swear more than usual?