The Boo Laundrette.

It's been a week, our laundry bag was getting heavy, and we do like to wear our favorite clothes. Monday became laundry day and our laundromat of choice was the Boo Laundrette in downtown Cirencester.

Of course, being an oversized village and medieval wool town, negotiating the warren of narrow streets in the old city was no small feat. But we had scoped out the parking lot, the route, and the location of the Boo well in advance. We even had set aside some one pound coins for the Brewery Car Park. We assumed the Laundrette would give change. It opened at eight.

We were there at eight. The door was locked and no one inside. We rang the bell. Nothing. We begin to get a little desperate. Then Shari noticed the only intelligible instruction in that laundromat, which was to press the button and open the door simultaneously. It worked.

Inside was nice and clean and lonely. But no change machine. There were no instructions posted on the wall as to how much it cost for a load in the washers. We had about £2 in coins. We put a coin in and the washer's screen lit up and asked for another £6 some. We had no such amount in coins.

It was still early, but the butcher shop a block and a half away was opening. I asked the woman, "Could I trouble you for some change? Pound coins? My wife and I are trying to do laundry and the laundromat has no coin changer."

She smiled. "Say no more." and she gave me £5 in pound coins.

Elated with my success, and impressed with yet another example of British kindness, I returned to reassure Shari that all was well. We got the wash going.

While the wash was washing, we had time to decipher the dryer instructions. Here was the clue. A typed and overwritten piece of paper pinned above the dryers which read: "£2 = £1 coins only". The £1 had been handwritten on a tiny piece of paper and sticky-taped over something else.

After about five minutes of pondering alternative interpretations, we reckoned that neither our £2 coins nor our 50p coins would work. The sign meant £2 to get the machine to work and the machine took only £1 coins.

We needed to exchange our coins for £1 coins.

I hesitated to go back to the butcher again. So instead of going out, then left, I walked out, then right. The One Pound store was open. Kinda like our Dollar stores. The doors were open, lights were on, and two young school boys dressed in uniforms were cruising an aisle.

"Can I trouble you for some one pound coins?" I asked in the most calm and polite voice I could master. The lady smiled and asked me how many. I asked for ten £1 coins in exchange for my ten pounds worth of £2 and 50p coins. She pulled out a handful of £1 coins and counted them out.

I returned victorious to Shari who was anxiously waiting. The One Pound store. Of course.

While we are watching the clothes go round, a woman came in dressed as you would expect for an early, chilly, overcast morning that threatened rain. We exchanged polite and warm greetings, she deposited her load of wet clothes into a dryer, and left.

Now comes the good part. A few minutes later, another woman walked in. She was a rather striking woman. She wore a short red dress and high heels suitable for an evening cocktail party. She made no attempt at eye contact or any greeting, but walked right up to the dryer with her Ikea blue bag with wet clothes and shoved them in the dryer. I was sitting next to that machine and, being polite, stared at the ground, unavoidably looking at her naked legs and painted toenails in her high heeled sandals.

Like the first woman, she left. Obviously both women knew the system and how many minutes of dryer time £2 bought.

Now comes a better part. After a few minutes, the dryer used by the woman in the red dress made some god-awful bashing noise. I looked at the dryer and saw a woman's belt tumbling around and around. A belt buckle. Okay.

Now comes the best part. About another five minutes later, I saw some white, rectangular shape tumbling around and around in the dryer used by the woman in the red dress. I thought that was a little odd, but I am polite and did not stare at someone else's laundry in the dryer. But I couldn't help noticing that it was a piece of paper. Okay. She hadn't checked and emptied pockets.

Here's the punchline. As the minutes passed, more and more sheets of paper appeared through the glass door of the dryer used by the woman in the red dress. Soon there were twenty, thirty, and who knows how many more. Now I got curious, stared through the glass, and started reading the printed text on the pages. They were the pages of a book. I read page three hundred and something on one sheet. They were all neatly separated and so many of them were tumbling around and around that the clothes of the woman in the red dress were no longer visible.

Of course, I pulled out my video camera and took some shots of the pages going around and around in the dryer.

Our loads were done, folded, and stacked in our laundry bag so we left. But both Shari and I would have loved to have seen the expression on the face of that woman in the red dress when she came to retrieve her load and opened the dryer door.