Ever wonder what a person learns from 57 summers yacht cruising, serving as crew aboard boats from 18 to 50ft and then joint-owning a series of sloops and a ketch, not to mention the odd charter? What lessons have been learnt on those journeys via half a dozen seas, two continental shelves and three types of keel?

Yachting Monthly offers plenty of good skipperly advice from grizzled old sea-dogs and up-to-the-minute early adopters, but does anyone want to consult this wrinkled ruin of a she-crew? Might you, noticing the marks of wear and tear and interestingly placed contusions, ask, ‘What have you learned about glum, thwarted arrivals?

What is the first, best thing to do when you all arrive in a harbour in a possibly resentful mood? What do you do when a holiday cruise has started feeling a bit disastrous due to weather, breakages, desertions, injury, ailments or just mutual simmering irritation with what John Masefield called your “laughing fellow-rover”? How can you swiftly improve things, in one word? Therapy? Drink? YouTube cat jokes? A ferry ticket home?’

No – the answer is laundry! Trust me, that’ll help more than anything.

Once you have completed setting bow and stern lines and both springs (‘YES, I AM BLOODY DOING IT!’), and squelched up to the Capitainerie or scornful harbour desk to haemorrhage money, this is your moment. Take control, and confiscate from all aboard their most demoralised and unappealing garments.

Ideally these can be stuffed into their pillowcases, because those too will be sweatily imbibed with terror pheromones, the corners possibly even gnawed through during several difficult rolling, jerking overnight anchorages.

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Grab it all, even if you leave some crew stranded in underwear. Locate the faithful laundry liquid bottle, which has naturally leaked all over the heads locker, and investigate which coinage, jetons or secret codes are required to make the local machines work. Might be a marina set, or one of those outdoor pavement arrangements of public washer- and-drier popular in French and Irish tourist sites.

Take a book. Find a bench, wall or nearby pavement to sit on. Settle down. With luck, for the next hour and a half the fact that you are performing a sacred communal duty will protect you against petulant disturbances.

You will be relatively immune to mad consultations about crew-change arrangements and tidal contingencies. As laundrymaid you are entitled by natural justice to ignore five separate, different and equally depressing weather forecasts relayed by the said fellow-rovers.

Gazing at revolving underwear is a form of mindful meditation: let your soul be washed clean of everything maritime for a while in those soapy, harmless tides. The soft warm wind in the drier will do nobody any harm. Then, when those peaceful monastic minutes are over, and the last drier finally shudders to fulfilment, you can extend this Zen peacefulness for a while with some meditative, careful folding and pairing up of socks.

So now you are at last in a mood sufficient to face whatever emotional or financial fallout may have come from the travails of the preceding passage. Present yourself back to the ship. Be proud as you distribute a lovely largesse of sweet-smelling and beautifully dry clothes, towels and pillowcases (ideally to people who have had showers).

Supper itself will feel more civilised in the knowledge that the drying-up cloth is not, this time, going to add more damp and bacteria than it wipes away.

See what I mean? Any grumpy yacht crew fresh in from the sea is a micro-culture, with all its own languages and jokes and habits and laws and tensions. And all world cultures have cleansing rituals.

A good laundry run will function like a plainsong chant of purification, spreading love, hope and general reassurance. Everything will be all right now. Honest. Never fails.

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