Everyone does laundry. Almost nobody was taught how.

It was spring. The winter bedding had been folded away, the linens were coming out, and among them was a new sheet: pure linen, beautiful, and far more expensive than a bedsheet has any right to be. Nick’s partner had just bought it.

Then came the question: how should we wash this? Nick knew what he would normally do. He would put it in the drum and turn the dial all the way up, because he had heard somewhere, once, that bedding is washed at 60. He would call it a very guy thing to do. He also knew, in that moment, that he would never recommend it to anyone else.

Everything he needed had been there all along, printed on the label. Wash at 40. Do not bleach. Tumble dry on normal heat. Iron on high. A dry cleaner could take it too. Five symbols he had looked at the way most people do, as decoration. With the linen, he had got lucky.

So he went through the house, found the label on absolutely everything, and worked out what each symbol meant. Not everything had been as lucky as the linen. More than one good wool jumper had met its end along the way: no wool cycle, too cold, too warm, vinegar, no vinegar. Worst of all, he had blamed the people who made them.

Nick has a habit of falling into subjects, and he fell into this one. He isn’t a chemist. He is someone who has spent years reading and researching for the love of it, and he thought this one would take an evening.

It did not. He searched, and every page he found was certain, and no two of them agreed. For most questions about laundry, nobody had written the answer down in one place with the evidence beside it.

What there was instead was folklore, and folklore deserves more respect than it gets. For most of history it was the only teacher there was: lessons learned by trial and error, paid for in ruined clothes, and handed from one generation to the next. Its weakness is that it arrives without its reasons. When one family’s advice contradicts the next family’s, nobody can say which is right. Even the care symbols, which are an international standard, are something most of us were never shown how to read.

The more he read, the clearer one thing became. People weren’t washing badly because they were careless. They were washing the way they had been shown, and nobody had ever been shown properly. Including him.