On dry cleaners

There are many dry cleaners in the world. Some are better than others. The ones that also run an alteration service are better than those that don’t. However, as with hairdressers, I prefer to establish a relationship with the service provider before letting them chop off all of my hair or turn my coveted Nicole Farhis into shorts.

There is a fantastic cleaner near us (Hampstead Express, Finchley Road) which will take your trousers up at the hem (sadly, a service I require sometimes seeing as I’m a shortarse), which is a good place to start your alteration experience - generally shortening a pair of trousers is not the rocket science of altering clothing. I like it that if you’re not sure how much your keks need to be shortened, for example if your boyfriend/ girlfriend/ spouse/ cat gets a bit tired of crouching by your feet with pins, the cleaner has a little changing room so you can get changed and they can work it all out. This cleaner also takes trousers in at the waist, which is something I discovered recently, having become comfortable with the idea of leaving my precious trousers with a stranger. Ok, I tested them out on some invisible mending for Mr W first, but still, I was a it nervous walking out and leaving three pairs of suit trousers in the hands of a scissor-wielding (potential) lunatic.

This cleaner doesn't mind whether you state your required alteration in centimetres or inches. I hadn’t realised this was even an issue, as they appear to be equally comfortable with vague hand gestures as with precise measurements, metric or otherwise. Mr W took some of my trousers to the cleaners near his office today (not my favourite Farhis, obviously), and apparently they don’t deal in centimetres. Surely if I want something altered three centimetres as opposed to one-and-three-sixteenths of an inch, they should have the presence of mind to flip their ruler over and go metric! Bloody hell! So I’m getting my trousers altered one inch, and if they end up too long by, say, four millimetres, then I am going to pay them a visit. With a sharpened ruler.

Despite my love of the cleaners near where we live, I have not used them to clean my wedding dress. A surprising amount of people I know who have got married have not had their dresses cleaned – in one case, it’s been over three years since her Big Day. Having had experience of failing to clean an item of clothing on time, I wasn’t taking any chances. I've realised that stains can damage the fabric over time such that if you leave the cleaning too late, no amount of cleaning will restore the clothing to its original glory. Before we got hitched I checked out some dry cleaners in the area that specialise in cleaning wedding dresses. Hampstead Express didn't, so I called a couple and settled on the one which was closest to me, in Hampstead.

When I took my dress in to the cleaners, two days after our wedding, I was told that my dress was in good condition, which wasn’t surprising given that the entire celebration was indoors. We did go out, briefly, for some photographs on the Aldwych, but only very quickly and it's not as though I was hiking through some country churchyard in a muddy wet English summer or anything. Mind you, the Israeli dancing could have seriously ruined my dress – a couple of times when spinning around I felt someone stand on it, but they obviously lifted their feet before I did mine, and no shredding of dress occurred. I managed to pick up some slight red dots to the bottom of the dress, almost like confetti stains, and I’m assuming that was from Si’s shredded rose petals at the very end of the evening.

The lady in the cleaners said after about six or so weeks later I’d get a call to let me know it was ready. I called yesterday – it’s ready! Complete with veil and bolero jacket thing. Which is great news, because I can't wait to check it's as beautiful as it was before I wore it, then pack it away into a box, bring it home, and sell it.