Display Models

I was watching the local news on television recently (usually a comically gruesome experience). There was an item on, specifically to do with Leicester, and film was shown purporting to be of Leicester citizens being interviewed in Leicester city-centre street. But eagle-eyed Townsend spotted that it wasn't a Leicester street in the film, it was a Nottingham street. All our city centres look alike. The only landmark that especially distinguishes Leicester is its clock tower, and any day now I expect to see that it has been turned into a security watch-tower, with guards posted on the ramparts ready to turn anybody in who has been spotted singing or smoking or laughing in the street. It is a joyless business being a consumer – knowing that the only reason you're wanted in the city centre is for your money.

My washing machine has been broken for two weeks now. Dirty clothing is stacked like planes over Heathrow, but I can't bring myself to enter a shop and be told, yet again, that they have only the display model in stock. And that, even though the porthole door has been yanked open a thousand times and that the switches have been pressed and the detergent tray has been dragged open, I cannot have a discount. I like to take my goods away on the day I pay for them, I am unable to wait for items to be delivered from the John o'Groat's warehouse. In recent months, I have bought a rice cooker, a toaster, a television and a video, all of them display models. Is this an incredible coincidence or have the big electrical chains secretly done away with their stock rooms?

I recently selected a mobile phone from the display cabinet in a large store. The salesman said, ‘I'll just check that we've got one in stock.’ Smiling pleasantly, I said, ‘You won't have one, you'll come back and tell me that I'll have to buy the display model.’ In a very short time he was back saying… Well, you know what he said, I can't be bothered to write it down.

So I'm washing by hand. My husband has made valiant attempts to mend the washing machine (which broke two weeks after the warranty expired). He has even converted a brass picture hook into a washer for the nut that attaches some damn thing to the belt that turns the drum around. But despite his best efforts, the home-made washer refused to bond with the nut. The grown-up children who live in this house did a lot of cynical eye-rolling as they watched my husband grit his teeth and wrench the back off the washing machine, yet again. They live in an age of built-in obsolescence.

I blame myself for not setting a good example – the last time I darned a sock was about the time of the moon landings. But there is a certain pleasure to be had in washing by hand and hanging it out in the garden. I get great pleasure in watching the wet washing billow and crack on the line in a stiff breeze. Though, it has to be said, I get more pleasure from a large vodka tonic. I now get out of bed in the morning and hope for wind, rather like the captain of a becalmed sailing ship.

When the children were young, I couldn't afford a washing machine. I used to fill the bath with warm water and biological washing powder and encourage my child labourers to stamp up and down on the clothes. The scene was something out of Dickens. But the children seemed to enjoy it (we didn't have a television either) and it didn't half get their feet clean. Once the washing had been pegged out on the line, it often used to hang there for three or four days. Once it was unpegged and brought into the house, it immediately transformed itself into that monstrous thing called the ironing. I wonder how many people ever get to the bottom of their ironing basket. I know I've got something (it's a blouse of some kind, composed of polka dots and frills) that has been lurking in the basket since Cliff Richard won the Eurovision Song Contest.

I hate all of my domestic appliances. The vacuum cleaner has a mad fit and chokes to death if asked to suck up anything bigger than a baby's fingernail clipping; the iron is menopausal and has hot flushes and scorches linen; the dishwasher maliciously coats everything in diluted mashed potatoes; and the tumble dryer doesn't believe in interfering with nature and, after an hour of noisy tumbling, returns the washing as wet as when it was first put in.

I know I'll give in eventually and drag myself out to a dreary, windswept retail park and buy myself a new washing machine. If you hear about the salesman who was attacked by a middle-aged woman for saying ‘I'm afraid we've only got the display model, madam’, you'll know it was me.