Right Shower

You might think that with that title I'm about to continue on a political theme and talk about politicians or the March to Leave, which only seemed to prove that there wouldn't be riots on the streets if Brexit was stopped and made me want to visit the amazing sounding clock museum.

However, I do actually want to talk about showers. 

Showers weren't a thing when I was a child.  Sometimes, I can't believe what I write in my own blog. Had showers not been invented? I don't know but we didn't have one.  Today, houses are built with several bathrooms, nearly all of them with a shower and most people have a shower every day.  I can't quite believe how fast bathing has changed just in my lifetime.

When I was small, before my Nan and Grandad's house was condemned and replaced with crowded three-story 1970 terraced houses, they lived in a Victorian house with huge high polystyrene ceilings that had holes in where Mum and her sisters had pinned balloons or stuck their fingers, just for fun. That house had no bathroom.  There was an outside toilet, a pot (or 'gazunda' , as my Nan called it) for nighttime wees and a tin bath that lived in the room that smelt of washing powder, damp and rat poison, and was put in the living room on a rug in front of the fires for the weekly bath.  I have a memory of my grandad sitting in the bath singing to opera and pushing his tiny round glasses back onto his nose.  This was East London, with a football club at the end of the road.  I can't remember my other grandparents' bathroom facilities, except that they had a cesspit but I somehow doubt they had indoor plumbing. We lived in a modern bungalow with a nice avocado bathroom suite.  But bathnight was still Sunday, only.  If we wanted to wash our hair, without getting too many bubbles in it then a jug was borrowed from the kitchen.

Later, a gadget was invented that pushed onto the bath taps to spray water at you.  This worked well until one of the rubber ends fell off and you suddenly had boiling hot or freezing cold blasted at you. It didn’t help that the rubber ends were round and our bath taps were square. 

When my Nan died Mum had a small inheritance of £5000.  I'm not sure why I remember the amount but I also remember that she used it to buy a new carpet for her bedroom and have an en-suite shower installed.  Dad did the plumbing, so it always leaked a bit but it was new and modern and Mum was thrilled with it.

I hated it. 

"I'm just not a shower person," I would complain to my friends, "You can't read a book in the shower."

Over the years I've persevered in trying to like the shower. It's not  just that you can't read a book, the shower has so many other problems.  You bang your elbow on the wall, there's no room to avoid the water while it's getting to the right temperature and when you leave the shower you step into a cold room (or a hot room if its a heatwave and you are cooling off).

Our en-suite needs updating but with all the changes that are happening at the moment we have decided to put it on hold for a while, which means our old leaky shower is out of commission. The children have left home so there are no queues for the bathroom and we can use the shower over the bath.  

What a revelation!

I like a shower in the bath.  There's room, you can avoid the too hot water, the whole bathroom gets warm from the steam and I suddenly am enjoying showers.  You still can't read a book but you can't have everything.