Am I being precious about how to use my tea towel?

3 hours ago 2

Danny Katz

February 28, 2026 — 5:00am

While I iron and fold the tea towel so it’s ready to perform its roles of drying washed items and hands, my partner believes it to be a multi-tool for wiping floors and dirty benches. Am I being precious? K.F., Monbulk, Vic

Photo: Illustration by Simon Letch

A: Not precious at all: everyone should be honouring the tea towel. It arrives in a new home all prim and pristine, brimming with optimism, thinking, “I’m a tea towel! I originated in 18th-century England where I was used by the maids of the manor to dry fine-china teacups. Clearly, I’m about to embark on a lifetime of upper-class, tea-related duties! Hoorah!”

But no. No tea-related duties for this poor tea towel. Instead, it’s used to wipe down filthy benchtops, dry off oily frying-pans and mop up spilled puddles on the floor by being rubbed back and forth with a foot (a foot of all things – heavens!)

And when it becomes too scungy and stained for kitchen use, it’s demoted to the laundry room where it endures years of Dickensian conditions, polishing windows, cleaning toilet bowls and getting rolled into a whip-shape to swat blowflies (or, worse, the unsuspecting buttock of m’lady!)

And when the tea towel is too frayed and fetid for laundry use, it’s sentenced to a decade of hard labour in a shed, blotting up paint spills, degreasing barbecue grills and lining kitty-litter trays until it’s just a few feeble threads held together by Dulux White Watsonia and feline excretions. Then it’s cruelly chucked in a bin where it dies alone among the household waste, a used teabag plonked on its ragged face – the final, ironic indignity.

Tell your partner to start using tea towels with respect! Let the dirty, domestic jobs go to that wretched, lowly commoner, the Chux Superwipe.

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Danny Katz is a columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He writes the Modern Guru column in the Good Weekend magazine. He is also the author of the books Spit the Dummy, Dork Geek Jew and the Little Lunch series for kids.