CAN’T SEW, WON’T IRON

There are two things I can’t and won’t do in life. In fact, there are loads - parachuting and swimming with sharks spring to mind - but I’m talking about activities that are expected of me.

The first thing is ironing. My problem is that I am too impatient, I can’t smooth an iron over a pair of trousers, I have to do it with a whoosh of steam and excessive pressure on the garment and everything always ends up looking worse. As a result, I believe wholeheartedly in the effectiveness of folding. Folding is good enough for me and for the children and if the Father of the Children needs an ironed shirt, he does it himself. It is not, however, good enough for my mother. When I let slip this week that I don’t iron, I might as well have said I don’t wash. She looks at the Father of the Children, as if to say “Divorce her, I would”. Begrudgingly she asks me why I don’t send the ironing out. What she doesn’t seem to understand is when you haven’t ironed for this long, there just isn’t any. Ironing begets ironing, it’s as simple as that.

The second thing is sewing. I would absolutely love to be able to sew, gaily running up pairs of curtains in a weekend, producing adorable smocks for Flo’s dolls, that kind of thing. Sadly, it is not to be. I was the one with the bloodied, grimy sampler at school and unfortunately, that is how it has remained. Up until recently I thought I had got away with it. Then the children started taking part in swimming competitions, arriving home triumphant with little badges to sew on to their towels or swimming costumes. What’s worse is they’ve joined the Beavers and Cubs group in the village. This is one big sew-on badge fest, as far as I can see, dedicated to publicly humiliating the non-sewing mother.

To cap it all, the head teacher went into a complete strop last week about the amount of un-named and hence abandoned school uniforms. We were all informed in writing that scrawling our child’s surname in biro on clothes labels, a practice I have embraced, was no longer acceptable. I’m beginning to fear it is a conspiracy. I now have an enormous pile of stuff to sew, and I am just not up to the job.

The Father of the Children, sweet man, says he will sew on the swimming and Beavers badges. Although certainly more gifted in this department than I am, he’s terribly slow and the children will achieve their next badges long before they can display their present ones. They complain about this a lot; we explain we are doing our best.

“Why don’t you ask Granny to do it?” they ask. “She’s really good at sewing.”

Over my dead body, I say to myself. So, I decide to search the Internet for ingenious naming devices. I discovered this wonderful website called simplystuck.com. Excellent, inexpensive super-tacky stickers which you can put on everything. They’re dishwasher safe and washing safe, everything safe. Marvellous, fantastic, how many shall I order? Hooray, two hundred - I can stick our surname on everything. They arrived swiftly through the post, I torethe pack, loads of little stickers to go on lunch boxes, juice bottles, tennis rackets – I went mad. In my haste, I hadn’t realised that the clothing stickers, divinely straightforward for most, need to be ironed on. Ah, yes. I will do it, I just can’t guarantee when.

Life in the Slow Lane is written by Clare Kent. She has three children - Max is nearly eleven, Flo is nearly eight and Bobby is six and a half - and lives in Wiltshire.

Read Claire's previous diary