A room with no clothesline, in Lisbon, in January

The room was eleven square metres, on the fourth floor with no lift, with a window facing the wall of the building opposite. Lisbon in January means fourteen degrees indoors, humidity everywhere, and no heating, because the country long considered winter to last about three weeks.

I washed two t-shirts and three pairs of socks in the sink, on a Sunday night. I’ve done this every week for years, and it’s never a problem in a room with a radiator or a balcony.

Here, there was a chair, a door, and a shower curtain rail mounted at an angle.

What the room forces on you

By Tuesday morning, the t-shirts were still damp. Not wet, damp, which is worse: it smells like the bottom of a bag, and that smell doesn’t wash out next time. I wore one anyway, because I hadn’t planned on being held hostage by my own laundry.

An unheated room does two things to laundry. It slows evaporation, which was predictable. And it forces you to spread the fabric out, because a garment folded in half over a chair back dries at the edges and stays wet at the fold. A chair back isn’t a miniature clothesline, it’s an object that does exactly the opposite of what you’re asking of it.

What you need is two anchor points and a line strung between them. The whole family of objects covered here tries to solve exactly that, and most of them do it by adding a problem of their own.

The object

A braided elastic cord, two strands twisted around each other, with a carabiner at each end. You hook it between two points, part the strands with a finger, slide in a corner of fabric, and let go, and the twist is supposed to close back up and pinch.

I haven’t verified that last point, for lack of having the object. What I can check is the listing: 1.8 metres at rest, 3 metres stretched, nylon and polyester, no pegs included and none required.

There’s nothing else to it. That’s the entire point of the object. Travel pegs sell in bags of twelve, you lose three a month, and you have to remember to replace them. Removing a consumable from a forty-litre bag counts for something.

It costs about the price of an airport coffee. It’s also ridiculous: it looks like something out of a 1970s mail-order catalogue, and I can easily picture the comment it would draw in a dorm room.

Four objects out, one retained. None of these reasons requires having tested anything: suction cups, pegs, and drilling are all stated by the sellers themselves, and it’s those very statements that disqualify them.

None of these figures have been verified by me. They come from the sellers and are marked as such, which is the only honest way to publish them.

The section’s filter

Four conditions, all four mandatory.

• It fits in a forty-litre bag. Yes, the entire family fits in a pocket.
• It clears cabin security. Yes. No blade, no liquid, no battery.
• It costs under about fifty euros. Easily.
• It’s objectively ridiculous and it solves a real problem. Yes to both, and that’s rare.

Verdict: indispensable, and the argument fits in one sentence. In an unfamiliar room, what doesn’t exist can’t break.

These three questions stay open because I haven’t bought the object, which is this site’s rule, not an exception. The details are in what I don’t test.

The t-shirt I wore damp that Tuesday ended up in the trash three cities later, because the smell never left. One garment lost over forty-eight hours of failed drying, out of a bag that holds six. That’s the real cost of the problem, and that’s why a section devoted to ridiculous objects starts with this one.