Woman signs up for two weeks work. Ends up staying 30 years

A laundry manager who has ironed more than a million items of clothing in her 30 years service said she only meant to cover a fortnight’s maternity leave.

Val Robson, 56, puts on 30 washes and irons more than 180 items a day at Middleton Hall Retirement Village in Middleton St George, near Darlington.

Despite ironing more than 1.1 million items in her time at work, the grandmother still presses her own clothes on Friday evenings, as long as she has a glass of red wine and a Westlife CD on.

She said: “I get a lot of job satisfaction from coming in on a morning and seeing rows of empty baskets, and then seeing them all full of fresh, clean clothes when I’ve finished. I never stop.”