QJM Advance Access originally published online on February 8, 2006
QJM 2006 99(3):199-200; doi:10.1093/qjmed/hcl010
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Personal services
At the end of our street there is a dry cleaning shop with the delightful name of Etiquette. The Turkish lady who runs it has been there for about 20 years, roughly the same length of time that I have lived in my house. In the past I had little to do with her, because I used a dry cleaner near my surgery, but last year I resigned from my practice in order become a freelance GP and to concentrate on postgraduate teaching, so I now take my clothes to Etiquette.
In the months I have been going there, the Turkish lady and I have developed a routine of repartee. She knows that I am a doctor (from the name on my cheques), and always asks if I am busy at work today. I make a great play of saying no, I am never busy. In fact, I tell her, I avoid work at all costs: perhaps I will do a locum surgery some time next week if I feel in the mood. Anyway, I explain, I spend most of the time telling other doctors what to do. It is less stressful than seeing patients, and earns me more money. The Turkish lady laughs, knowing that I am telling some kind of truth, but not the whole truth. If she asks me what kind of doctor I really am, I tell her that I am a pretty awful one, and I would certainly not recommend myself to any patients. But she asks me from time to time for advice about a medical problem in her family, and suddenly we both become serious for a while.
Very often, there is another lady in the shop, an English woman who appears to be a regular customer-cum-friend. Usually she seems ensconced there, sometimes with her own chair and a cup of coffee. She joins in our repartee as well, perhaps with an anecdote about some terrible doctor (‘Most doctors are terrible’, I am always happy to affirm.) I complain that the lady behind the counter never offers me a chair or a cup of coffee. The two of them cheerfully gang up on me and the talk then turns to women and friendship, versus men and business. All this time, other customers come and go, and most of them also seem to enjoy participating in the banter, like a game of verbal ‘consequences’, played by the whole community.
It has recently dawned on me that I always come out of Etiquette feeling happy. On mornings when I drop my clothes in on the way to work—for I do occasionally undertake work—it helps to set me up for the day. On late afternoons, when I collect them on the final stretch home, I feel a little revived. The dry cleaning shop is a place where I shed responsibility for a few minutes, and take on a personality of choice. It offers, I suppose, a form of therapy.
The dry cleaning lady, it has to be said, does not look like a therapist, but then few good therapists do. Yet I would not be at all surprised if she knows exactly what she is doing. Possibly she would be able to name the attributes that make her such a good therapist: curiosity, challenge, humour, a good memory, continuity of care—and of course etiquette. I wonder also if she makes the connection between her role as therapist and the care she gives to her clients’ clothes. We take our soiled and crumpled clothing to her and she turns them back into spotless, comfortable and nicely pressed garments that we can be proud to wear. Sartorially, she is offering us a form of transformation, a symbolic washing away of our grimy everyday failings, a resurrection of hope, and new beginnings. And while she does so, maybe she is offering us the same thing conversationally as well.
We have quite a lot to learn from dry cleaners, and booksellers, and taxi drivers, and newsagents, and the hundreds of other people to whom we chatter away unthinkingly every day, under the mistaken impression that we are just passing the time and they are merely being polite. A hairdresser I spoke to the other day explained to me patiently the reasons why people trusted him more than they ever could their GPs: he is reliably available to them every time they book, he touches them physically on every occasion they see him, he is sensitive to their exact wishes, and he takes all the time they need. ‘The thing is’, he concluded, without any hint of irony or condescension, ‘unlike your job, ours depends entirely on understanding psychology’. I suspect the dry cleaner at the end of the road might say much the same.
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