Bed Linens

Laundry day today. My washing machine and dryer each take much, much longer than back home – I have noticed this here and at my Uncle’s, and my American/Canadian friend now in Oxford confirms it. So it’s more ‘laundry week‘. I can usually get through two loads a day, but at three hours a load in the washer alone, it is an all day undertaking. (And I don’t like running the dryer when I’m not home, so I have to turn it off when we go for a walk, and then remember to turn it back on.) Today is bed linens.

I don’t get the British approach to duvets. I mean, of course, I get duvets – they are nice and cosy and warm on a winter’s night, and they look nice on the bed. What I don’t get is their sheets. As at home, sheets are sold in a ‘set’; unlike at home, that ‘set’ is one fitted sheet and one or two pillowcases (depending on the size of the bed).

My first week in Orkney, I went into Tesco (the woman at the local linens shop had been a tad snotty when I went there first – maybe she thought I was a tourist wasting her time by asking about bed sizes in the UK? – so I decided not to ‘shop local’ that day) and picked up two similar-coloured but slightly different packages that looked like one fitted sheet and one flat sheet (each with a pillow case) for my temporary single bed. Turns out I had bought two fitted sheets – the slight difference in packaging was due to some re-branding by the manufacturer – so for my first few nights I slept with a fitted sheet on the mattress, and a ‘naked’ duvet. I hunted high and low (including going back into the local linen shop) to find flat sheets, but to no avail.

My cousin was quite surprised when I complained about this. It seems the Brits simply use the cotton duvet cover as their top-sheet. Why, she asked, what did North Americans do? I explained, as she & I were wrestling the duvet cover back on the duvet in her Dad’s guest room, that we buy fitted and flat sheets together as a set, and use both on the bed. Well, what about the duvet? I told her that we bought a pretty cover for it, and treated it like a bedspread. What was the benefit of that? Why not just remove, wash, and replace the duvet cover when changing the beds? Why involve an extra sheet? (Did I mention we were ‘wrestling’ with a cover as this conversation was going on?) I tried telling her that our way involved far less work: strip the bed weekly and wash those sheets, and maybe strip the duvet every few months or so – less wrestling. But clearly I am in the minority in this way of thinking – I have yet to see flat sheets in Tesco.

*There was even an article in a British newspaper this week – a Mediterranean journalist telling the Brits how to beat the heat during this unusual heat wave: one recommendation was to ditch the duvet for the summer, and just use a thin cotton top sheet at night. Genius.

But, here at home, I continue to dread, postpone, then angrily tackle changing the bed and washing the linens every week (who am I kidding – every two weeks). It was bad enough wrestling with a duvet cover when there were two of us, but when it’s just me, well, FFS, life it too short for this crap.

Edit: I found super-strong, made-for-the-islands clothes pegs last month, so I am now hanging much more of my laundry outside. I went out just now to bring in the duvet cover – it was gone! It must have blown away. No, wait, there it was – it had been moved?!? It must have blown off the line and a neighbour saw it and re-hung it on a different part of the clothesline. Except, my clothesline is tucked away in a back corner of my garden – who the hell had been wandering around my yard? Had it flown into my neighbour’s yard and they came all the way around and returned it to the line without telling me? Or, I finally realized, it is an umbrella-styled rotary clothesline stand, and the wind had spun it around – way to go, Einstein. Paranoid much?