wringing the changes

Haven't much time to tell you how grim it is up north today I'm afraid but today is one of those days when I rilly think about how my life has changed. The washing machine is broken again, perhaps it was continuously having to wash the children’s clothes after they'd been brushed against by one of the local children coming out from their MMR injections and trying to pass their autism on to my own darlings, or perhaps it was my sitting on top during the spin cycle thinking about Colin Firth one too many times but nevertheless it was down to the river with the washboard today to hunker down amongst the local women and try and get those nasty northern germs off our southern clothes. 'Why do you all gather at this same spot to do the washing?' I enquired. 'because the outdoor privies all empty into the river just down there', it was explained. 'What kind of washing powder to you mostly use?' I asked. 'Serf', came the reply. I began to suspect then that not all of the local women had staggered down to the river laden with laundry simply because they had all been pestered by the au pair to let her have the range rover on her day off, nor that they had all been re-reading Bridget Jones Diary on the tumble dryer again so I tried to conceal the designer labels from my Primark pounding and Wilkinsons wringing fellow washers but alas it was inevitable that someone would notice eventually. ‘Shouldn’t you dry clean Lacroix pet? Said the hunched up old woman next to me on the cold foggy slippery muddy foggy cold muddy foggy slippery foggy bank, hardly visible behind her headscarf and layers of charity shop clothing. She was so old and haggard I asked how long she had lived in the village. 'I came up here last year when I left university' she said. I thought I could get an amusing book about northerners and their amusing northern ways out of it for people to read on the Picadilly line. They told me the americans would lap it up too'. I shivered as a northern cloud blew across the northern low winter sun and the cold northern river fell under a northern shadow, and also as my new friend told me that today was her 24th birthday. ‘where’s the nearest dry cleaners?’ I asked. ‘Copenhagen’ she said, and we both carried on scrubbing our washboards, like an all girl northern aquatic skiffle group, just as if it were 1956. Watford Gap, Watford Gap, Oh to be only fifteen miles from the Watford Gap…sigh