james’ opinion

Increasingly, it seems to me, people are rejecting the humble bathtub in favour of the more modern and chic showerhead. Showers, they claim, are faster, more water-efficient, allegedly more hygienic. I will not deny that showers have a few practical advantages over baths– particularly their speed– but these, I believe, come at the expense of the proper cleansing of one’s inner self (I do not mean colonic irrigation). Allow me to explain.

Get this: defenders of the shower are tragic victims of today’s hectic lifestyle. This is the same hectic lifestyle that sells people cereal bars and instant rice. When there is no pressing need to bathe with haste, the shower appeals only to our diminished, YouTube-addled attention spans, the torrent of pressured water jets providing an instant fix of sensory overload. There is no opportunity to submerge oneself completely in the bathing experience, to relax, reflect, luxuriate. Each day the stressed and overworked office employees of the world stand beneath pummeling showerheads when they should be alleviating their anxieties in a lovely hot bath with an Adrian Mole novel and some stolen hotel toiletries. No wonder Wall Street has crashed.

Showers lack, too, proper opportunity for the nurturing of the intellect– for the bathtub is the best place in the world to read. I have developed excellent one-handed shaving and even shampooing techniques for this reason, turning pages with my thumb, and can proudly claim to have only ever dropped a book into a bath once. (It was hastily rescued with surprisingly little water damage sustained; thank God it wasn’t a hardback, which would have sunk like a stone.) I am sure that my lifetime of dedicated bath patronage has broadened my mind’s horizons far beyond the curtain of any narrow shower cubicle. The best an intellectually-minded showerer can hope for is a few stolen minutes of Front Row with Mark Lawson on one of those waterproof bathroom radios, which is admittedly not a bad catch, but nothing any person in a bath couldn’t also enjoy for the full duration of its broadcast with a copy of New Scientist in one hand and a gin-and-tonic in the other. You’d have to get out before Woman’s Hour though.

I have heard more than one critic declare shudderingly that in a bath one is merely “sitting in a pool of your own filth”. Of these people I ask: where do they think this filth resides the rest of the time? They don’t sit in cars and living rooms and workplaces each day frantically scrubbing their hair and skin with steel-wire brushes and bleach, do they? I admit that if one is particularly dirty– I mean greasemonkey dirty, mud-wrestling dirty– a shower is the remedy of choice, but none of these critics are car mechanics or strippers. They are well-dressed twenty-somethings with facial cleansing products and cereal bars. Besides, the charge is clearly beside the point: even if I were luxuriating in a bucket of my own slime for half an hour, I always manage to emerge from the tub mysteriously silky-skinned and smelling of Head & Shoulders. It must be all that water and soap.

But the pool-of-filth people look close to vomiting when I go on to tell them that my family often share bathwater. (I should clarify: not at the same time. If nothing else, there isn’t enough room.) I find no shame in this, though one person I told this to responded as though I had said my mother still breastfeeds me. The sharing system means that whoever has to hose down the tub with the showerhead afterwards tends to have a grisly time of it, but it is merely sensible, and handily undoes the claim that showers use less water. As long as you have a big family.

I hope that the bath manages to reclaim its once-noble status. Have we forgotten that the citizens of the Roman Empire, the civilisation that invented sanitation– bringing with it plumbing, flush toilets and sodding great aqueducts– spent half their time arguing about epistemology and gladiators in steamy public baths? I understand that Japan maintains some version this tradition today, having seen some slightly erotic videos on YouTube demonstrating as much. And the enlightened population of Iceland, my other favourite-country-I’ve-never-been-to, also enjoys public spas, no doubt when relaxing between intense sessions of recording cutting-edge electronica/post-rock rock albums. We should look to these wise countries for guidance in these uncertain bathing times (perhaps disregarding some of Japan’s ideas about appropriate YouTube content).

The fact is that baths are cradles of spiritual and intellectual refreshment. They also get you nice and clean. The next time I have a bath I may never get out. I invite you to join me.