And isn’t ironing so terribly last century? It hasn’t really changed since the electric iron supplanted the heavy metal number our great-grandmas had to heat on the range. So, I was thinking, we are ready, very ready, for a radical change (what’s known in the jargon as “thinking outside the box”), a smart new solution that will make dashing away with the smoothing iron as outmoded as the laundry mangle. And then the Siemens Dressman arrived at my door.
This is a gizmo intended, say its creators, “to dry and iron shirts and blouses, leaving them ready to wear in a matter of minutes”, and it is certainly thinking outside the box. But it was a bloody big box, and when I finally wrestled the Dressman out of his packaging and realised that he assumes the form of a headless body immersed in a slab of concrete from the hips down, my reaction was that until my teenage son is old enough to leave home, I just don’t have the house-room for Dressman. But hey — beloved child, or hassle-free ironing? — let’s not get hasty.
So, down to business. Armed with the 32-page instruction manual that appears to have been translated from the original German by a computer program, I open up the base unit from which rises Dressman’s parachute silk-clad “upper body”. Just pop the shirt, blouse or jacket onto the torso, pushing the “arms” through the sleeves, switch on the hot-air blower and, within minutes, you have a perfectly ironed garment (I’m summarising the 32 pages here).
Of course, it wasn’t that simple: it was, in fact, a bit of a faff, lots of clipping and fixing that I suppose you might get faster at, for a result that was okay for a school shirt, but not as crisp and fresh as the application of an iron could produce. Never mind the mysteriously precise figure of 117 hours a year Siemens claims I could save by hiking down to John Lewis and forking out more than £999 for a Dressman: I reckon they now owe me back the hour I spent to sort of iron one shirt.
Still, I’m not saying it wasn’t fun: how we shrieked, over the the blast of the blowers, as the arms inflated and slowly raised themselves, for all the world like the early prototype for one of those semi-mechanical creatures that terrorise Wallace and Gromit. Good for a laugh, then, but, sadly, it’s back to the drawing (and ironing) board.