Ironing made easy

It’s bizarre really.

I always used to hate ironing, really hate it, but since the advent of podcasts, I love it.

There is nothing finer, especially when it’s raining outside and you’ve caught up on all your freelance work and you’re not feeling particularly creative, than popping the pile of unironed clothes on one side and churning out neatly pressed garments on the other.

And all with the aid of the latest podcast.

There are several on which I’m hooked at the moment, with many more in the listened to and recommended pile.

The Rest is Politics is one of them, with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart but particularly the US version with broadcaster Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci, who was Trump’s director of communications for ten days in 2017 and is now a candid opponent of the former US president.

My brother put me on to that one. It’s laugh-out-loud brilliant, and hugely informative. The latest episode, in which the listener learns of Scaramucci’s surprising role behind the scenes for the Democrats at this week’s big debate, is revelatory.

From there, I went to The Rest is History, a programme hosted by two very amiable historians, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, whose banter is delightfully schoolboyish in its delivery.

I was glued to their series about The French Revolution, and also the one about the Piltdown Man. But the latest one about beards through history is astonishing.

For example, in 1698, Peter the Great of Russia brought in a beard tax, which men had to pay for the privilege of wearing a beard. To prove they’d paid, they had to wear a beard token featuring the lower part of a face with a beard.

Who knew?

I certainly didn’t.

Other fascinating podcasts to which I’ve listened in recent months include the BBC’s To Catch a Scorpion, a real-life search for a people smuggler who transports migrants from the European mainland into the UK; The Ratline, a story of love, denial and the Nazis, and Worse Than Murder, about the kidnapping and murder of Muriel McKay in 1969. The men who took her thought she was the wife of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.

Then there’s Marianna in Conspiracyland, about the rising tide of misinformation on social media, and The Gatekeepers, a truly terrifying account of ‘how social media allowed a new digital elite and their platforms to conquer the planet and control what we see’

I get through a lot of ironing.

Women Ironing, by Edgar Degas (1834-1917). I suspect the woman on the left is drunk on podcasts and the other one has earphones hidden under bonnet.