I pride myself with being an early 2020 adopter as my 2020 suddenly turned to poo at the end of January.
As pretty much the rest of the world I spent a lot of this year indoors. I baked sourdough bread and pizza, looked outside the window, checked out the weekly fox fight, envied the small balconies in the building opposite to mine and admired the persistence of the second floor lady sitting in one of the aforementioned balconies, working on her suntan, 9 to 6, Mon to Sun, April to September. In the UK. Talk about optimism…
But days were slow to pass and there is only so much bread and pizza one can bake and eat. So I decided to wash, iron and — to make my mum proud — for once, neatly fold and organise all the clothes in my wardrobe. (With the help some easy-fold tool, because I have very poor folding skills).
I started with a bang. Jeans Day was so satisfying: jeans are easy to iron and easy to store. The unlucky single hand-towel thrown in the washing machine for no real reason turned a bit blue, but I learnt this very obvious lesson.
Cardigan Day was a bit annoying, I seem to buy only cardigans that can’t be ironed, don’t fold nicely and end up wrinkly and wonky no matter what. Not a success but also not a complete failure.
T-shirt Day and Jumper Day were a huge success: easy to iron and once folded and arranged by sleeve length and colour, they made for nicely packed, scented, and visually pleasing drawers.
Sock Day was a day for self-reflection. I had to face the fact that my sock collection is big enough to fill my washing machine and that maybe it’s time to not buy socks for a while. Because they are so many, and to make sure I can see and wear them on rotation, socks were the only properly sorted and stored item in my wardrobe, but they got a fresh round of washing and folding anyway. In the middle of the process, I thought I could also iron all the socks but even my mum thought this was a stupid idea, apparently no one does this.
Shirt Day started with the usual washing cycle and with the best intentions. But, when faced with the task of ironing a pile of shirts, I decided it was time to shift my energy into making the bottom of my pots and pans all shiny again. So I stored the wrinkly shirts back in the wardrobe, where they stay untouched to this day.
Bette(r) Days celebrates the things that did not suck in 2020. Each day in December, we’ll be posting about the highlights of our collective garbage fire of a year, type-related or not.