February 27, 2014, by Eve
The Art of Drying
Student living presents many difficult problems for the common student to over. Difficulties such as how to create a nourishing meal out of one onion, five easy-peeler tangerines and three and a half crackers. Or how to survive when you’re bursting for the toilet and a housemate has just gone in the bathroom for a shower. Or even how to open your peculiar front door. All of these are important, tricky and exasperating issues to deal with however, for this blog page, I have chosen to consider the trickiest and most utterly exasperating of student life’s flummoxi: the art of 
drying. Specifically, drying wet washing (which you should have done a week ago and thus is extremely excessive in quantity – and smell) in the chilly seasons, which, in Britain, covers about 10 out of the 12 months.
Now drying clothes doesn’t have to be difficult – product design students have seen to that, with the invention of various drying apparatuses – however, in the student world life is not always simple. One could even call it life, but not as some know it. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in the Middle Ages; the cold, the eating without plates, the primitive drawing style.
In terms of drying apparatus, our house has three: two working, one broken. Like the bathroom, these drying things are sometimes unavailable but, unlike the bathroom, they can sometimes be unavailable for several days, if you keep missing the housemate who has adopted the apparatus into their locked bedroom. And even when you do manage to grab hold of a mythical drying clothes horse thing there will invariably be a large amount of clothing left over.
(Small Note: Where did the term ‘clothes horse’ come from? Did people really dry clothes on a horse?)
Today, I was faced with the predicament of having lots of wet clothes and not even a horse to dry them on. This, as with any student problem, promoted much imaginative action. Where to hang clothes?
Radiator – seemed like a logical option.
The back of a chair; this wasn’t a great idea for, if I happened to sit in said chair, I’d receive a damp hug from a soggy cardigan.
On the door knob: this only really worked for small things like socks. And could only hold one item.
I pulled out my draws and hung clothes off them. I did this with the bedroom door too – but had to take the hoodie down at night because it looked like an unfriendly, and familiarly dressed, visitor.
My proudest invention was a short washing line of string, running from cupboard to desk. But this didn’t really hold very well for heavy things. I also learnt something about cellotape: it only works in large quantities.
So there you go. Some inventive, original and bizarre ideas for where to dry clothes in a student bedroom!
And, no, nothing’s dried yet. My room’s too cold.
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