ON Saturday afternoon I was planting some perennials in the border Dad had been meddling with last summer.

While I love pottering in my garden I am a lazy gardener. I much prefer the flowers and plants to grow rife and wild, suffocating the weeds and attracting the butterflies, rather than hunting down spades, rakes and forks, which are usually lurking behind some overgrown shrub or log pile. I don’t want to fanny about in mud.

Anyway, to plant these yellow beauties I needed the spade for fear of chipping my blue nails, so I had no choice but to face the shed.

I’ve never been fond of the arachnid magnet, but having no choice I opened the door and instead of a giant spider, I came face to face with a pair of my Dad’s gardening slippers.

I thought I was doing okay. But I’m not. I decided to sell my house.

So, after my tears had dried, I rang my best friend to tell her the news.

“Oh sweetheart, I know how you feel, I felt the same way when my Dad died, but do not do anything for 12 months. I know you might think you are okay, but you aren’t. In fact, you are probably bordering on the demented, I know I was. You won’t see clearly for a long while yet and you need time to adjust to losing such a massive part of your life. Don’t do anything, do you promise me, not a single thing to change anything, not just yet anyway.”

Instead of calling an estate agent I stripped my bed, and Dad’s old one and then the Teen’s and pushed every duvet, pillow and bedspread into four bin liners and drove them to the launderette in Highcliffe.

I can’t remember the last time I have washed our feather duvets – it’s possible that I never have (all right, I never have) as I haven’t been to a launderette since I was 18 years old and they would never fit into my archaic Zanussi.

I arrived, thinking I could dump them off for a service wash and then return to pick up freshly laundered bedding in an hour or so. Not so. The attendant wasn’t there.

Fortunately, a very helpful man pointed me in the direction of Tesco’s for the washing powder and then explained how to work these ridiculously huge machines.

It didn’t work and so I was forced to ring the attendant, who had pinned a mobile number on the door.

It transpired that I hadn’t put enough money in the slot. So, £17.20 later I had clean duvets albeit soaking wet but then I then had to chuck them in the dryer at 50p for 10 minutes.

I was in the launderette for four hours – you do the Maths.

But then I had a bit of a brainwave.

I could open a 1950s-style launderette in Ringwood, complete with jukebox, headscarf, cigarettes and a coffee machine. I wonder what my best friend will say? Dial...