DELORIS KOAN | When male laundry pride must give way to womanly acts of love

I am tatty, say my much-loved women friends.

This can feel like familiarity breeding contempt, and indeed the latest comment "Mmm, I need another trip to Asia" while a friend studied my favourite but faded, occasionally holey, bush-green, grampa-necked item.

But this is my coolest cotton shirt, and the comment is being made at a time when I am making a big concession.

Caught in a copy deadline and travel bind, I relented to allow woman friends to do my laundry.

This is the first time in 13 years that I had openly consented to someone else doing a full load of my laundry.

In circa 2013, I decided that after 53 years of this gender-based domestic inequality, I would man up and do my own dirty washing.

The logic was infused with a typically eclectic political analysis of acknowledging that African domestic workers had born my stinky burdon — and cleaned my living space, initially for poor wages — for too long.

This burden, however, always had a crossover impact — my mother, sister and now this, always had a hand in said dirty linen. Somehow, this historically transferred labour inequality was shared by all women.

The best way to illustrate my point is to ask: how many of you ous do your own laundry?

It's not as if my generation of men don't know how: most were in the not-so-great civil war — soldiers washed their own brown or camo jocks and battle gear.

Perhaps that is where we learnt that making perfect beds, dusting every speck of dust brought into the Diskobolos barracks by the devil’s wind coming off the Groot Karoo, and using one's gleaming boots as a mirror to check out a 19-year-old chorby face, was menial, hard labour. Intentionally so.

So hands up okes? Make me feel less alone.

And yet, my laundry journey has been liberating. I have turned it into a magical music trip into the wilds.

My landlady's windy drier is like a fallen elder tree in the forest — it is the only window to the sun in our overgrown backyard.

I hang laundry to the sounds of choral classics, Bach and Buddy Guy, Aretha Franklin and Jennifer Ferguson — and the heavy metal of Ozzy and the hadedahs alongside the virtuoso twittering riffs of Jeff Beck and the masked weavers. Both are classic Gonubie Point nature-based bands.

I am endlessly tweaking my peg and washing line permutations, playing with cinch knots, and scenting the wind.

Is it a Berg, beastly eastly or west wind? For each will dramatically affect my drying rate and will determine if I have to turn my pieces to expose damp spots.

Clouds are in the picture too. Rain and gust fronts are a constant worry and as you know, ill-considered pegging will see your prized R400 aubergine-studded sexy jockeys flying high in the sky. Next time you see them, they are sticking out, gangster style, above some fine street fellow's trouser line.

I do not perform this act of self-laundering merely for myself and personal self-care. I do it for my women friends who have the olfactory senses of jackals — a sour laundry whiff is among their most repugnant smells, a total turnoff, I'm told.

Men? We don't give a *$%&. We almost enjoy it when a China rocks up to fix our motorcycle wearing a sackcloth Tee ripped by toothy bike parts, splattered like a Jackson Pollock with clutch, brake and chain oil, surrounded by a saintly aura of sweat, beer and cigarettes.

I draw the line at fish guts and putrid red bait. That's a bit much.

I am also a bohemian dresser, apparently a person whose "social or cultural lifestyle or aesthetic rejects conventional mainstream rules, consumerism, and social standards".

That was Google AI ruling my mind, but I would like to think that East London — now KuGompo City — has embraced this aesthetic yonks before Google was merely an idea in some code writer’s mind.

We, in our city of Slummies, have walked free of shoes for decades, maybe conceding to protect our beetle-horn soles with a rubber dignity patch held to our toes by a thong. These are our perfectly named slip slops — slip ‘em on, sloth about.

We like to sashay in the breeze in baggies, kilts or run bare-chested.

Looking neat and spiffy is something we reserve for key life moments when we are "hatched, matched and dispatched" — birth, marriage and funerals.

I am always happy to clean up for a special occasion as a mark of respect for family and friends and lovers.

Last week, on the day my friend Janine’s celebration of life service was to be held, I was at Woolies at 8am to buy a brand-new blue shirt — just because her grieving partner and my swim partner, Barbara, say blue matches the colour of my eyes. I have no idea what this means since I have not ever looked at the mirror and tried to do the maths.

But I thought that in some miniscule way, this small act might be comforting.

I also scrubbed my jeans, trimmed the threads on the hems of the leg cuffs where they had dragged along the ground with my knuckles, and washed my black takkies.

These plumbed the depths of my man laundry skills, for I ran out of time!

Two hangers were cable-tied at right angles to keep the broeks open to better drying and the Skechers were turned often in the sun to drain toe and heel as the hour approached.

I finally sprayed the shoes stukkend with a linen spray donated by my visitor. Wait, do you think I was being given a message?

Can't be! For when I receive guests, I blast the space with essences like peppermint or bergamot.

I have a Scottish immigrant's ingrained resilience to fashion extravagance. Thanks to my dad, Scotty, I am a buyer of lasting clothing items. I might splash out on an Italian burgundy pure cotton long-sleeve shirt and pair of smart Vans skate shoes, but I will wear them to the grave.

All of my women friends are repulsed by my motorcycle boots. They reserve special areas in the boot of their cars to where they are banished when we head out to swim.

I think they are a work of art, I mean they are official BMW GS adventure gear! They are meneer. I tell everyone they shall be on my feet, sticking out from my mushroom shroud when I am buried/composted.

I also want my dress style to show solidarity with the people of my city of whom almost half live lives shredded and scored by unemployment, for whom daily flashy dressing is an affront, a statement of gauche excess and obscene consumerism, to quote a former vice-chancellor of Rhodes University, Salim Badat, who said it at almost every graduation ceremony.

In fact, he spoke out against "crass materialism," "narcissist hedonism," and a rampant "culture of impunity and greed" sweeping through South African society.

In the audience, I would imagine a fine-fed politician or businessperson racing through a desperate shackland where infants die of starvation in a smart black SUV while clothed in Italian designer garb worth thousands of rands to inspect the work of a skimmed and starved infrastructure tender.

This perceived kleptocracy made me want to wave my tattered, fisted sleeve in the air and shake my fist with fury.

The problem with my personal fashion protest is the Guild Theatre. Who does not want to arrive on that wine-red carpeted foyer spectacularly draped in anything but your most loved finery?

This is a place where art and fashion are intertwined. Half of the pleasure we draw from the creativity shining from that stage is actually dressing up to get there!

This is an act of tremendous, live, real fun.

Now I am in a fix, my proletarian aesthetic versus my love of art.

I am truly undone.

To make matters worse, I returned home late last night, climbed wearily off the bike, hauled my overweight 1200 GSA pterodactyl onto her centre stand and clumped off to my flat like the Borg, knuckles dragging, again.

Turned on the bedroom light to behold upon my bed. My dreams answered!

I typed this message to my women friends: "Home. Thank you for my welcoming little pile of freshly folded laundry. Gratitude."