Trousers on the line

It took a man to show me that I'd been hanging out the washing wrongly all these years, and so had the generations before me.

Gran, Mum, then I, had always hung trousers up by the waistband. It seemed the right, sensible and visually correct thing to do. But the other day Mr Grumpy washed some clothes and I noticed, to my surprise, that he had pegged them out by the ankles. (Well, you can't say 'feet', can you? Trousers don't have feet. If they did, you'd encounter jeans and jeggings racing down the road to get away from whatever sweaty, smelly, overstretched fate awaited them!)

"Why are you doing that?" I asked him. "Look and learn," Mr G replied. "The weight of having the waistband at the bottom straightens the trousers so you probably won't need to iron them, you can hang other things between the legs and the wind can blow in and dry the items hanging behind them."

I had to admit it was a jolly good idea and I wondered why I hadn't thought of it myself, considering that I've been hanging washing out for... well, more decades than I care to remember. Why hadn't my mother, my gran, my great-gran even, thought of it? Why did it have to take a man to devise such a simple way of saving space and the chore of ironing? Or maybe that's the whole point! My ears still ring to the memory of Mr G's smug chortle. How men love to be right, especially when it comes to scoring points off women. Ha! I'll get my own back somehow. Watch this space.