Behind Blue Eyes

I think it’s amazing how our expectations have changed over the last few decades. Not such a long time ago (in the scale of human development), washing was done regularly but infrequently. It was hard work to wash clothes, so they tended not to be washed as often as we now think normal. Running a bath was not the simple task it is in this day and age. Of course until very recently many people did not have their own bathroom. When the first social housing was built, it was considered cutting-edge for flats to be built with access to a shared bathroom in an era when many used public baths.

These days anyone without a bathroom would be considered “disadvantaged” or “excluded” or “poor”. Through my own actions I have been severely disadvantaged this week. I have had no hot water and no bath or shower for the best part of a week. It is amazing how unpleasant it is, and how used to the idea of having a hot shower at least once a day I am. The first morning I washed under the cold tap of the kitchen sink. Shaving was pretty hard work and washing my hair was verging on masochistic. The mains water in this building is very, very cold. You can’t wash properly in a sink and you certainly can’t wash pleasantly in cold water. So I decamped to my mum’s house.

Mother has a wonderful powerful shower, installed lavishly by the previous owners of her house. They must have spent a large fortune on the bathroom. The room itself is the size of my flat, it has the biggest bath this side of the Atlantic and the pump spouts jets of steaming hot water. Seriously, I walk to the tube station with a spring in my step after using that shower.

It wasn’t very long ago that showers became popular. They are very practical things! Where would we be without the quick shower? The main thing I don’t like about baths as a washing means is that you end up stewing in your own dirty water. Showers are quick, effective and relatively economical – needing only a fraction of the amount of hot water required for a bath. You are probably thinking “why is BE going on about this!?”. Try and go for a week without a shower, punk.

But this advancement in cleansing technology has had a strange effect. I now regard taking a bath as rather decadent and wasteful. I have put a bath into my new bathroom for practical plumbing purposes (the building’s pipework makes it more sensible to have a bath than a shower cubicle) and for aesthetics. Not to mention hoping that the flexibility will improve the saleability when I move on… But I do not expect to have a bath very often. Running a bath uses up the entire volume of the hot water storage tank, burns a huge amount of gas and no doubt costs a fortune.

I now have a bath with hot water but no shower until tomorrow (hopefully). I ran a bath this evening. As I plunged into the piping hot depths of my rather expensive bathtub I realised that it is probably years since I last had a bath. It really is luxurious, and decadent, and hugely wasteful.

It’s amazing how the novel can become the ordinary, the previously ordinary can seem extravagant and the past can look impossible.