Baths or Showers?

I just had a nasty thought . I honestly can’t remember when I last had a bath. Not because I reek of body odour and can knock out the dog at 5 yards – it’s simply because nowadays I prefer to take a shower rather than stew in my own dirt and sweat in the bath.

Somehow that still seems strangely anti-British. There was a time when showers were a strange American phenomenon. Not to sophisticated continentals though – my sister was surprised to find that the house in Holland they moved too did not even have a bath. Dutch real estate execs must have been waxing lyrical about the joys of ‘wet room’ years before it cropped up on UK radar.

I used to be a ‘bath person’ myself. There is nothing quite like relaxing in a hot bubbly bath after a hard day’s work – or exhausting bit of exercise. Except I can’t actually recall either doing a hard day’s work, nor a tiring bit of exercise.

I also suspect there is nothing quite like a nice hot bubble bath with Keira Knightley and a bottle or two of champagne. But that pleasure too seems to have passed me by for some unfathomable reason too.

So as you might have noticed I am more of a shower person nowadays. But I do have one gripe. Why are shower enclosures so minute? I can understand why seats at football stadia and on trains are built with anorexic dwarves in mind – they are in it to make money and squeeze a few more people in.

But surely when you are in the comfort of your own home you are entitled to shower enclosures big enough for one. Or even one and a half if Keira Knightley can be persuaded to join you?

Outside of that, things are looking good. You can buy all matter of showers with head that look for all the world like 1950’s metal colanders, through to multiple power showers that threatened to power you straight back out of your tiny shower cubicle.

You can even have cold or warm water – but not exactly when you anticipate if hard water has played havoc with the shower controls in your bathroom. I wonder if electric showers have made big strides forward. When I was student our flat had two electric showers – and neither was entirely reassuring. One alternated scalding hot water with icy cold. The other simply blew a fuse.

I used to wonder why – but now I am a bit older I realise that it happens to us all with advancing years and being expected to work first thing in the morning.