Lavendaria

The late Duke of Edinburgh had a quip "biggest waste of water in the world: pee half a pint and flush two gallons"; which I've cited before. I give similar side-eye to putting clothes, and household 'linens' through a washing-machine after a single use. This partly driven by the easy availability of the tech [cheap electricity; the complex of builders, surfactants, enzymes, and fresh-smell in detergents; cheap water] and partly by a fear of smelling of anything other than  fresh-smell and flowers. My students generalized this anti-pong aversion from their own and others' oxters to pretty much everything in the lab - especially anything wafting from a Petri-dish. Believe me, you wouldn't be so keen on the scrub-a-dub if you had to suds the clothes in the bath - which I did for a couple of years in a rented flat in the 1980s - let alone toting a basket down to the communal lavendaria down by the river. When I walked up the remote Atlantic coast of Portugal in 1989, communal clothes-washing by hand was still A Thing. In 2004, walking from Portugal to Santiago with The Boy, the village lavendaria were still there, but unused. I packed two shirts for seven weeks. Part of the ritual of landing for the night was to wash today's shirt and hang it out to dry while wearing tomorrow's for the evening.

For the second week in June this year, I was again marching with The Boy, and living out of backpacks. At the first gîte, a washing machine was available for a nominal €2 extra. One of the other pilgrims said we could throw our kit in with his, which worked out well for everyone. It was the south of France, the sun was still up, the clothes bone-dried before we went to bed. At the Gîte Communal in Navarrenx, two days later, Aurélien l'hôte had formalized this water-saving practice: Please don't wash your smalls in the hand-basin, throw them in that basket and I'll put on a wash before dinner. If they are not dry from hanging in in the morning, I run everything through the tumble-drier. I'd rather not, and I guarantee they'll be dry before you leave tomorrow.

Laundry on the Via Podensis is now institutionalized and hand-sudzing is a thing of the past. 

Apart from the laundry water that disappears down the plug-hole to add enormous volume to the water needing treatment, there is also the residual water in the damp clothes. M'daughers are sharing a tiny flat in Dublin and have to dry clothes on a rack in the living room. The water has nowhere to go so there is a perennial damp problem. Now that everyone has a washing-machine at home, the next white-goods must-have will be a de-humidifier.

There is no truth in the the etymology of laundry having anything to do with laying sheets out on a lawn to dry. Laundry is rather a corruption of old French lavandier one who washes, ultimately from Latin lavar to wash. And lavender Lavandula spica [as above L] has nothing to do with it either, despite the old fashioned custom of putting sprays of that plant in amongst the bed-sheets.  Lawn  n., a fine white linen/cotton 'Cambric' fabric, associated with the vestments of Anglican bishops derives from the town of Laon in NE France. Cambric aka otoh comes from Cambrai = Kamerijk a weaving town 100km further North in French Flanders.