Glad to bring back the memory.

Love the podcast - love the accent !!!

My wife came from a family of eight from a pit village near Newcastle-u-Tyne and her mothers most prized assett was her Bendix automatic washing machine, she kept it on a service contract long after the maintenance company begged her to stop asking them to call out, in the end they replaced it free of charge, it was cheaper for them that way.

The person who invented tissues should be canonized!

Baino my mother used a small bowl of water and she dipped her fingers in it and then flicked the water onto the clothes item on the ironing board.

I remember when I got my first automatic washing machine, after using the GE spinner type (a bit like the one in your picture) for 5 years. The year was 1955.

I was so thrilled to get it that I was washing everything in sight. My husband said that I would have put the mattresses in the washer if they would have fit. He was right!

Then a few years later came the dryer. I was in Heaven. No more clothes lines and having the baby’s diapers FREEZE on the line and having to be draped over a radiator to be softened and dried, only to be wet again in an hour or so……..

Oh, Elly, you are a lucky girl to be living in the era of Drip dry and Perma press clothing. I wanted to press something the other day and couldn’t because I was not able to locate the IRON……… Hallelujah………….

‘Malone or Cherry Velley’ lol!
After 30 years here in the wee north it feels like a lifetime.

I was born and reared in Dublin. My mum got the washing machine in 1949. She needed it with all our gang. We had very long back gardens and there about three stretches of clothesline.

You were very posh - washing machine in the 1940s and your yard inside. You must have lived in Malone or Cherry Velley!

I remember my Nan in Somerset still doing the Monday wash by hand in the 1970s. Rainwater was brought in from a tank (the local water being very hard and no good for suds). She had a spin drier and a boiler (for doing the whites). The Christmas puddings used to get wrapped in muslin and boiled in the boiler!

Stop wishing your life away, just live NOW!

I’m also lucky on the ironing - neither the hubbie or I have to wear formal clothes for work, it’s jeans, t-shirts and jumpers all the way. I made a conscious decision years ago to stop buying clothing that needing ironing, and to this day there are only about 5 pieces in my entire wardrobe that need ironed - these days I rarely iron more than one item a month!

Dishes are another matter, for that I have my hubbie, but he only likes to work one day a week normally. Roll on next summer and us getting our new house, it will come with a dishwasher! No more planning meals by what implements are still clean!

Hoovering and floor washing is the next task in line to have the effort taken out of it - thinking of asking for one of these for Xmas 2008 (yes mother, I still plan that far ahead!)

As long as that’s all it is?

I’m usually good at reading between the lines - even clothes lines