Bathtime

I’ve just taken a bath. I can’t remember the last time I had one, but please don’t misunderstand me. I haven’t, in the meantime, allowed myself to become a greasy, festering ball of grime – at least, not so as anyone has commented on, anyway 🙂 It’s just that I’ve been taking showers instead for at least the last 15 years. I know that because my last house had just a shower, no bath, and I moved into it in 1998, since when I’ve never enjoyed the experience of lying down in a large volume of hot water. Until this evening.

My house here, like many others in France, has a bath with a mixer-type shower. The latter works very well compared to a similar one in the UK, because the water here is pumped around the system at quite high pressure, and a humble mixer shower here works better, in my view, than an electric power shower back home. So it’s always been easier and more convenient just to jump in the bath and take a shower. But darn it, this evening I felt like a bath instead.

The reason was that I’d had another quite busy day and I felt a bit achy after having been relatively inactive over the winter. While I was mowing the front lawn yesterday, with my ‘new’ mower, I hit yet another stone. This dislodged the plastic cover that encloses the ‘autotracter’ (self propelled mechanism) belt so I had to tip the mower onto its side to fix it. For some reason, during the process oil managed to spill out somehow from the sump and when I restarted it, the engine just wouldn’t run properly. So this morning, I had to strip off the carburettor, which is built into the fuel tank, and clean it out. Amazingly, after an hour or two’s work, it started immediately once I’d got it all back together and after half-an-hour’s mowing, it was actually running better than before. So after that I had to plod up and down for a couple more hours mowing the front grass. This was the second time after only a few days and I was amazed at the volume of grass that I’ve now taken off. I haven’t taken it off actually, because I left the grass box off, and the whole lawn is now covered in small heaps of grass cuttings that are about 4-5″ high!

After a quick lunch (hurray, back to salads again!) and a trip down to Montignac to post my aircraft insurance papers off and grab a few things in Intermarché, I thought that as it was still about 20 degrees Celsius when I got back, it’d be a good time to go through the house with a bucket and mop to get rid of all the sooty dust from the winter. With that done and with my evening meal out of the way, it was time to think about the night’s ablutions.

Usually as I said earlier, I’d have just jumped under a hot shower in the bath, but after today’s exertions that left me with a few achy muscles, I thought that I’d give a bit of total immersion a try. I still had some garishly coloured bath salts in my bathroom cabinet, so while the water was rushing in, I chucked a couple of measures in. The water turned blue and foamy and I confess to having second thoughts, having visions of eventually emerging from the water with a blue plimsoll line along the length of my body showing the depth of water that I’d been lying in. However, I surmised that they had probably thought of that and that the colour most likely wasn’t a permanent dye. After a few minutes waiting for the bath to fill up (OK, I’m not made of money, it was about a third full…) I gingerly stepped in and submerged like a hippo entering its favourite watering hole. Well not quite, because a hippo gets totally submerged and even if I’d not been so tight and had filled the bath to the brim with hot water, I’d never have been able to do that. Now I’m no towering giant (ahem… far from it actually), but the bath is so short that with my knees sticking up from the surface like a pair of pallid breakwaters, I could still not lie flat enough to get my head anywhere near underwater 🙂

But I made the most of it and sloshed around rolling from side-to-side like an ostrich in a giant birdbath, until I adjudged that I was clean all over. I have to confess, I’d forgotten about the delights of washing your feet lying down instead of trying to keep your balance without falling over, teetering dangerously on one foot while trying to wash the other, but I’m not sure that this was enough to swing me away from being a shower-man. I remember reading a quote from someone many years ago that compared to taking a shower, having a bath is just ‘wallowing in your own effluvia’ and although I certainly don’t feel as strongly about it as they obviously did, I suppose to a certain degree they were right. I must say though, that when I washed and rinsed my hair, feeling the hot water cascading under pressure over my head and shoulders was a more exhilarating experience for me than lying there half-submerged in a bath of warm water.

But that’s not to say that I didn’t eke as much enjoyment out of the experience as I could. I did have the obligatory fart while I was lying there 😉