【チキンの脳内を解剖しよう】ロンドンのコインランドリーにて
ご無沙汰しています。
実はまだブログの存在を覚えています。驚きですね。
留学も残すところ２ヶ月になりました。
ついに試験を２つ残すのみ。授業だけでなく提出物も全て終わってしまいました。
帰国後にチキンの留学振り返り記としてうじうじ書く方が盛り上がりそうです。
色々なことがありました。
衝撃度と笑える度で最初のクラブ行きを上回るイベントは全く起きませんでしたが
（だからなかなか更新が捗らない）
10年後も思い出すだろうなみたいな出来事は色々ありました。
そうこうしているうちに（なかなかうざいけど）
日本語で長い文章を書いたり読んだりするのがしんどくなってきました。
ついに、高校時代に家族も同期も笑ってた難しい熟語使いすぎ症候群が癒る時が…。
さて、今回のエントリは超手抜きです。
ロンドンを見つめることで社会学を考えるという大好物すぎる授業の課題でブログ記事を書いたのですが、それをそのまま転載します。手抜き。
先生に高く評価してもらって有頂天というのが大きいですが、ロンドン留学でどんなことを考えて過ごしているか、私の脳内ではどんな会話が繰り広げられてるか、なんか見せびらかしたくなったので、どうぞお付き合いください。
なお和訳してなくてごめんなさい。
The Launderette on Marchmont Street
I enter a small store on Marchmont Street with a little unease, it is my first time in a public launderette. Unable to figure out the pricing system of the dryers, I ask a mother and her daughter in hijabs. The girl answers, “£1 is 15 minutes drying. See, it says here.” I start the machine and watch the pair talk in a foreign language while they load the family’s clothes. I wonder what her classmates are up to on a Sunday afternoon while she helps with chores.
It is rare for a conversation to happen between strangers in the launderette, except when it is needed to get the laundry done. Once, when I was waiting with wet laundry in my hands, a man came up and told me to move uncollected items from the dryers into plastic baskets that are scattered on top of the washers and leave them there. There are certainly some unspoken customs in the launderette, and regulars know them. The launderette is a space of cooperation and silent rivalry. I once made the day of a fellow user by swapping her change with a 20 pence coin, and once there was an elderly lady guarding an empty drier from other users before her washer was done.
The launderette is also a space where private life meets public gaze. Watson quotes; “You watch people fold their stuff, secretly judging their character on the basis of their underwear.[i]” I secretly judge a young man who carefully checks the washing instructions on pieces of laced lingerie among his load. The launderette interacts with its neighbourhood. Workers from nearby B&Bs bring in trolleys full of sheets and towels. Fellow users and I occasionally go to the corner shop across the street to get a can of soda and change in coins.
Berg, Gidley and Krausova argue that diversity studies risk methodological neighbourhoodism; assigning communities to a fixed character in a way that obscures multiple possibilities within an area[ii]. The Marchmont Street launderette challenges my neighbourhoodist mindset in two ways. It challenges my image of the neighbourhood it rests in, Bloomsbury, the academic and high-status residential area in central London. 98% of UK households own a washing machine[iii]. It is easy to associate the launderette with material deprivation, with the 2% who do not own a washer. I cannot help labeling some groups, the elderly people and the young migrant families in the launderette, as vulnerable and not likely of Bloomsbury. At the same time, it challenges my perception of the launderette as an icon of urban inequality. There is always someone, for example a woman dressed in smart casual, that defies my stereotype of a launderette user.
I picture the launderette in flux. People come and go in the launderette day and night. Watson points out travelers, students and new immigrants as the customers of launderettes; the people who come and go in the city, who are in a state between temporary and permanent residence. They are the people who are not registered as households and do not appear in surveys. At the same time, there are regulars, people I see every Sunday afternoon, who are a stable element in the launderette. A launderette can have layers of characteristics.
One weekday night in the launderette, a women asks me how to use the pay point. “This is embarrassing, I’m thirty and I don’t know how to use a bloody washing machine!” She came here for the first time, because she left work late and the usual launderette she uses had closed already. “Jesus Christ, it’s warm in here, I should sit here when it’s cold outside!” she says and everyone laughs.
Back[iv]argues that sociological attentiveness can ‘identify the public issues that are alive in the mundane aspects of everyday life.’ A student of sociology sitting in a launderette can peep and imagine many issues surrounding London; migration, inadequate housing, pensioner poverty. At the same time, as Back calls social studies ‘re-enchantment of the ordinary,’ enchanting the mundane is sometimes done before the researchers attempt it. A launderette user enchants a launderette by making a joke out of its banal feature. Attention to everyday life matters because it listens to moments of repair and hope, writes Back. Enchanting little moments make the launderette feel warm as I sit on its benches, and they scoop me from the sea of abstract thoughts, back to the actual assortment of fabric, machines and people that make up the launderette.
List of References
[i]Sophie Watson, “Mundane Objects in the City: Laundry practices and making and remaking of public/private sociality and space in London and New York,” Urban Studies52, no.5 (2015): 876-890.
[ii]Office for National Statistics, “Percentage of households with durable goods: Table A45,” (24 January 2019)
[iii]Mette Louis Berg, Ben Gidley, & Anna Krausova, “Welfare Micropublics and Inequality: Super-diversity in a time of austerity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies (10 January, 2019): 1-20
[iv]Les Back, “Why Everyday Life Matters: Class, community and making life livable,” Sociology49, no.5 (2015): 820-836.
