Pressing engagement

One day I decided I was tired of ironing shirts. I wanted my everyday life to be like a business trip, where you send your dirty shirts to be laundered, and they come back the next morning folded and wrapped in tissue paper. When you put them on again, they feel clean and crisp and have those professional creases that make them look like new.

And so, as an experiment, I took a pile of shirts to the local dry cleaners - or pressing as it's known in France. It is a cavernous, steamy place that smells, inevitably, of exotic chemicals. The decor consists mainly of steel scaffolding. This serves a practical purpose, as the horizontal bars are crammed with hanging clothes in plastic chrysalises. But there's so much of it. The scaffolding rises to the ceiling and stretches back into the murky depths, where more hanging garments lurk like bats. Hissing and spurting noises indicate that the heart of the operation lies back there.

This pressing is supposed to be one of the most reliable in Paris, and it charges about three euros a shirt. As I spend most of my life sitting at my computer in a T-shirt and jeans, I don't get through my formal shirts too quickly, so it's an affordable luxury. I've been addicted ever since I picked up those first few shirts. They were folded, stiffened with cardboard and swathed in individual plastic sheathes. This makes them ideal for packing. But even when I don't have a trip planned, I like to have a stack of professionally pressed shirts in my wardrobe. No longer will I curse and sweat as I rush to iron the creases out of a Thomas Pink, already late for a meeting. The iron age is officially over.