Remembering gentler times when we weren’t so wary of door-to-door salesmen and had more trust in the kindness of strangers, I think about laundry day in London. In the early 1970s my husband had the chance to work there for a year and we grabbed it! I took a leave of absence from my teaching job, we sublet our apartment, and packed up our raincoats and brollies. We couldn’t take our cat unless we quarantined him first for six months, so we boarded him...