Ben Machell goes on a Proustian journey with a box of Bold

Our columnist's bit on the side
Ben Machell16 June 2016

There’s a particular pub in Hackney with a beer garden which, during the summer months, I like to visit as often as I can. It’s not that it’s an especially sensational beer garden, but it is right next to a launderette, which means the smell of pub goers’ fag smoke mingling with the aroma of detergent and occasional wafts of warm air provide the kind of Proustian rush which, if my life were an ITV drama, would see me gazing off into the middle distance. The chatter around me would turn all echoey and indistinct before I’d eventually snap back to reality because someone was shaking my shoulder and going, ‘Ben! Ben! Here’s your bitter shandy and bag of scratchings’.

For my entire childhood, my gran ran a launderette. It was in inner-city Leeds and smelt of fag smoke and detergent and warm air. I’d go there on weekends or during school holidays and I would be incredibly happy: the women who worked there would fuss over me, I’d hand out coins for the washers and dryers, and I always had my pick of the lost property, which is how I ended up spending the summer of 1991 in outsized pink day-glo running shorts.

My gran ran a very tight ship. She once went to the cinema to see My Beautiful Laundrette assuming that it would be about a beautiful launderette and not, as it turned out, about an inter-racial gay relationship. Come on. That’s funny. She still cites the Trade Descriptions Act whenever I bring it up.

Back in the beer garden, this will all be running through my head while I’m sipping my bitter shandy, and I’ll think about how most people don’t really go to launderettes any more and how it’s a shame, particularly in London, a city where everyone could benefit from the enforced time-out of a few spin cycles. You can sit, read, chat, doze or entertain the faint possibility of a 1980s hunk coming in and stripping off to his pants so he can wash his Levi’s. Some neo-liberal hipsters will probably get their act together and set up a chain of them, replete with retro instant-coffee machines and mini boxes of Bold and Ariel. And I kind of hope they do, provided they get my gran and her mates in as consultants. They’ve still got what it takes. They deserve one last hurrah.

Follow Ben on Twitter @ben_machell

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