Your knickers can save the planet

COMMENT

It was a brilliant spring morning, a warm sun bathing the back balcony under one of those Bondi-blue skies streaked with the faintest filaments of cirrus cloud. I was pegging my partner’s knickers on the washing line, wondering what the hell I could write to meet that relentless weekend deadline.

Then it hit me. My neighbours, bless their hearts, could SEE these knickers. It’s just one of those things. All my life, my neighbours had been able to see my knickers on the washing line, and I theirs.

Whenever I had thought about it, I would mentally shrug and think, “Tough titties, we all have to dry our knickers and the sight of other people’s scanties fluttering in the breeze reminds us we are all the same underneath”.

Not that our knickers are that scanty any more, now we have reached an age where comfort trumps speed. Same goes for the neighbour.

So I was bemused by a radio discussion on the very subject I had heard that week. Deborah Cameron on her 702 Morning show was talking with the editor-in-chief of Sydney’s biggest local newspaper chain about bold new laws that allow bodies corporate to permit apartment dwellers to dry their washing on their balconies.

Incredible stuff, I know, but don’t worry – you still have to conceal it below the railing in case passers-by might think people in your block are a bit, well, COMMON.

Strathfield Council is up in arms about it, unwilling to let their respectable suburb go entirely to the dogs.

Dear Deborah again betrayed that middle-class streak which nearly touches both sides by commiserating with callers about the embarrassment of neighbours seeing your bloomers.

Make no mistake, this below-the-balcony-rail rule doesn’t fool anyone. As the conversation pointed out, people living in flats – sorry, apartments – above the offending washing would get a clear view.

And half the balcony railings in Sydney are transparent.

It’s a tough one, but what with electricity prices skyrocketing and the planet choking on its own carbon pollution, even respectable people are beginning to think twice about using that clothes dryer.

The average home dryer has a carbon footprint of approximately two kilograms of carbon dioxide per load, according to Wikipedia.

Multiply that by all the flats in Pyrmont, for instance, and you get a lot of black balloons floating up into the state’s coal-fired skies.

Dryers also fill your flat with that unpleasant humid hot-clothes smell while they “may cause clothes to shrink, become less soft (due to loss of short soft fibres/lint) and fade,” says Wiki.

Plus, you have to clean the filters regularly as I discovered to my cost in a previous life. I had the flatmate from hell who, while the rest of us used the Hills Hoist, always used my clothes dryer because she was never organised enough to tackle her laundry problem until midnight the day before she needed the clothes.

Then one night the machine gave up with a loud bang and an electrical stench, which gave my flatmate’s clothes a peculiar ozone scent for a few days.

It seems she had never cleaned the filter and the cursed thing just cooked in its own heat. I simply refused to have the beast fixed, and that was that. After a couple of weeks going to work in used clothes, my vain flatmate just had to get organised and endure the rest of us seeing her drying scanties (which were, as a bonus, very scanty).

And that’s how we should all handle it. Stuff the neighbours, stuff the body corporate. Chuck the beast over the balcony – at least figuratively – or keep it for long rainy periods only. Let’s get over this false gentility and secretly enjoy having a perv at the neighbour’s knickers while saving the planet.

by Michael Gormly