Pressing Concerns, ho ho

The more terminally bored among you might be giving anxious thought to how we are keeping clothes uncreased since the dog ate the iron. Fortunately we favour the crumpled look, but with a wedding looming it seems seemly to invest in a new one.

So, chancing upon an Argos catalogue (why do children love catalogues so much? F8 favours the ScrewFix catalogue, which he carries around everywhere, making him now an expert on a bewildering infinity of drill bits and overflow items) and having pledged to buy from T11 a number of Argos vouchers he was given for his birthday, I took me to the iron page. Correction: iron pageS.

For, people, irons have morphed. No longer are they merely a vaguely triangular thing you plug into the wall, and press bad temperedly over clothes while the owners of those clothes watch television. I have led a sheltered life and in the meantime irons have Got Modern.

There are 84 of them, and they are brightly coloured: they resemble trainers not boring old irons and, indeed, look as if, in their spare time, they like to go dancin’ or travel through space.
They have names, they are turbos and generators and experts, and want to travel the world, work with children and nurse sick animals.
Codes have been ascribed – brownie points if you like – for steam capabilities and soleplate function.
I hadn’t realised so many bits of an iron had a term, either. I’m all for the naming of parts, but familiarity with these is somewhat depressing.

Pages of irons there are in this catalogue, photographed – best side to the fore, please – against a flattering black, and all promise the world: they have become politicians.
No mention is made of their nasty little habits, their soleplate solecisms, their steam failings, their sneaking fondness for getting sticky on the bottom and dragging burnt brown stuff over clean white shirts.
I feel a primordial expectation of betrayal awaiting me somewhere down the line, about a week after the warranty expires, if things follow the predictable pattern of the past repeating itself upon the future.

Dizzy, I was, on staring blankly at the pages, suddenly baffled, a creaky door being force-opened in my consciousness to file, compare and assess something as deeply prosaic as an iron. Feeling that it is only when the wrong decision is made that all will become clear and too late will I finally know which one I should have bought.

It flooded back the Buying A Hi-Fi horrors of the ‘80s when woofers and twitters briefly obsessed me. Having heard of neither, suddenly I was meant to be basing a purchase on comparative wonders of same. Swiftly, they dominated my every thought until I succumbed to the inevitable, got an attack of the Sod Its and bought the one I liked the look of. Akin to betting on the Grand National on the basis of the horse’s name: forget Form, or Going or Past Performance: is its name cute? I chose, and never looked back. Although in those days, what my swinish children like to call the old days, built-in obsolescence wasn’t quite such the art form it has attained today.

Still I feel the compulsion to dither indecisively for an irritating amount of time, concealing this necessary part of the process in the arc from reluctant need to final ownership from E [Bill] who can be really quite unpleasant.

“What does it need to do?” he might ask, with an impatient and patronising tinge to his voice which I recognise from many other such forays into Choice Paralysis Land (kitchen, bathroom, granite, hoovers, all “white goods”, paint colours, carpets, cars, children’s names, “what shall I read next?” …)

“Iron,” I mutter meekly, all but crushed by his common sense. How can he not fall victim to the world of possibilities, albeit admittedly none of them being life changing, represented by this current iron-shaped hole in our lives?

“Well buy a bloody iron, then,” he says, “they’re all the bloody same.” (We value the power of language and favour descriptive words in our family, the mot juste.)
I rally tinily to gesture bold-weakly at how, actually, darling, this isn’t quite the case any more, and dare to whisper “soleplate”. He is not ready for turbo.

Fazed, rippling the pages between my anxious hands, I feel like an old person expected to understand rap music or to get an iPod to work. Or indeed just me expected to understand rap music or get an iPod to work. But at least I do recognise that rap and iPods exist whereas, in his bored denial he is rendered an old person refusing to grasp that either rap or iPods even exist, hands in ears like a child, nah nah nah (oh dear, an old person child). But since he is my very own old person who makes my iPod work, whereas I cannot, the analogy crumbles and falls and starts getting confusing and I need yet another little lie down.
The iron can wait. What’s wrong with creases?