We have a friend whose grown-up children live in America. Some years she visits them during the northern Summer. She reported that after they washed their laundry in the machine, they dried them in the clothes dryer even though wash days were usually warm and sunny.

Our friend’s children can’t understand why she wanted to peg clothes onto the washing line when they have a perfectly good drier to do the job. For them, the crisp cleanliness of sun-dried clothes, scented with fresh-air breezes, will remain one of life’s undiscovered pleasures.

Nor, it seems, do they allow themselves to think that their labour-saving, time-saving, energy-gobbling appliance might be contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. Not that I’d like them to feel guilty… well, maybe just a bit and only if it spurs them on to reform their anti-social ways.

In Winter here, laundry day is an exercise in patience and weather-watching. After the clothes have been washed in a machine (we do use one, we’re energy-conscious not Amish), if the weather’s fine we peg them onto our trusty, slightly leaning Hills Hoist.

We do this knowing that the washing could be out there for a few days and that it’s likely to be rained on at least once. After it rains, we drag the wet washing inside to dry.

Sometimes we’ll hang the clothes outside on a sunny, perfectly crystal-clear day with an empty blue sky, glorious sunshine, a light breeze, a weather forecast that’s bereft of rain… the works. They’re days that my mother used to call ‘good for drying’.

That’s in the morning. By evening I’ve forgotten all about the washing and it won’t be until 3a.m. that I remember it – along with childhood memories, names of people and plants that I’ve been trying to recall all day and thoughts of mortality.

The next morning I get out of bed feeling as if I’ve never been to bed to all. The garden is heavily dusted in frost and the water in the birdbath is frozen. On the clothesline, the tee-shirts, jeans, socks, underwear and pyjamas are encased in a light coating of ice.

I unpeg the stiffened clothes with numb fingers. As I drop them into the wicker basket they rustle, as though made of taffeta. I take the basket inside and arrange the washing on the clothes airer, the modern name for the stand that was once called a clothes maiden, or a clothes horse. (If you remember using coppers and mangles, you’re probably even older than I am.)

It never ceases to amaze me how many clothes I can fit onto our clothes airer. It must be the Tardis of clothes airers. The clothes stay on the airer for the better part of a week. I occasionally turn them, as if basting them, but unless I place the airer directly in front of the wood stove – which tends to shrink the socks – the washing takes its own sweet time to dry.

We were given the airer by my partner’s cousin, on his return to the UK after a sojourn in Sydney. If the end of its life happens to coincide with our striking it rich, I’d like one of those elegant, European-style overhead laundry airers that you can buy… in America!