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my favourite bathtime gurgles
Monday, 2 April 2007 07:35 pmFor someone with all the submarine functionality and aerodynamic grace of a brick in water-wings, I'm bizarrely fond of immersing myself in water. I can't swim worth a damn, owing to substandard limbs, sinuses and general co-ordination, resulting in a tendency to splash helplessly in ever-decreasing circles while my lungs try for water-breathing insta-evolution; I love the sea and like paddling in it of a fine summer's evening when all the sun-tan-oilers have departed, but at least one foot must remain at all times on the shore. Bathtimes, however, are an extended hippopotamine wallow and showers an imperative at-least-daily ritual, during which my muscles are unknotted, my teeth unclenched, my brain released to wander happily over vast imaginative waterscapes, and various world-shattering solutions to problems social, personal or literary are vouchsafed via hot water to my receptive form. I'm a water sign. You'd even think there was something in astrology.1
This being the case, I invite you to dwell for a moment on the horrors of my shower previous to the efforts of the Army of Reconstruction. It's a tiny bathroom, just large enough for a shower, toilet and basin; it also had a low ceiling, the better to condense steam and grow interesting Cthulhoid runic inscriptions outlined in black, creeping mould. The entire room was tiled in midnight-blue tiles, making it a light-absorbing, claustrophobic box. The tiles used to fall off at intervals from the damp-rotted plaster, usually in the middle of the night with a sort of muted, evocative, slithering crash which added materially to the all-round trippiness of my dreams. Behind the fallen tiles fronds of slithy green vegetation grew dankly, dividing their time between reaching out to caress the back of my naked, showering leg, and lurking tentacularly while plotting same. The shower was a Heath Robinson, home-made affair which enclosed the bather between a brick wall and a shower curtain. The former harboured my cat, who used to sit up there while I showered and peer down at me with a confusion and concern not entirely inappropriate to the venue; the latter played further host to the Cthulhoid mould, here a mystic spray of black dots whose cryptic patterns shifted strangely in the steam. There probably weren't actually rats in the walls, but by gum if there had been they would have fitted right in. About the only thing the whole set-up ever had going for it was water - lots of it, piping hot, and delivered with bracingly bullet-like force from an adjustable shower head at exactly the right height. Over the years, this alone has kept me sane.
In elegiac mood, I now survey the bathroom in the wake of the Army of Reconstruction's mighty efforts. Gone are the days of performing ritual ablutions in a sort of a cross between sunken R'lyeh and the House of Usher: instead, we have a shrine to Tethys. The ceiling is a good foot higher, and the tiles have departed to that hell of taste from whence they came; the whole is painted in a shade called "Moonbeam"2, a pleasing pearly white which harmonises aesthetically with the shower's marble tiles. The shower itself is a Tardis in gleaming glass3, the better to exclude passing draughts while enclosing the bather in (a) a resonant acoustic chamber for singing and (b) gratuitous quantities of steam, and with an enjoyably space-age sliding door. The whole Star Trek feel is continued in the shiny silver highlights to the towel rail, shelves for shampoo, toilet-roll holder and a nifty little wire basket thingy for holding the soap. (In the previous incarnation of the bathroom the soap was a homeless wanderer which tended to lead a complex private life of its own under the bathmat, possibly in hiding from the tentacled frondy things.)
One of my favourite textual threads in A.S. Byatt's Possession is the recurring theme of bathrooms: marvellous, shining, watery, private spaces in which transformations occur, mirrors and people reflect, things shift from solid to liquid to mist.
I'm going to have another shower now. And possibly grow fins.
This being the case, I invite you to dwell for a moment on the horrors of my shower previous to the efforts of the Army of Reconstruction. It's a tiny bathroom, just large enough for a shower, toilet and basin; it also had a low ceiling, the better to condense steam and grow interesting Cthulhoid runic inscriptions outlined in black, creeping mould. The entire room was tiled in midnight-blue tiles, making it a light-absorbing, claustrophobic box. The tiles used to fall off at intervals from the damp-rotted plaster, usually in the middle of the night with a sort of muted, evocative, slithering crash which added materially to the all-round trippiness of my dreams. Behind the fallen tiles fronds of slithy green vegetation grew dankly, dividing their time between reaching out to caress the back of my naked, showering leg, and lurking tentacularly while plotting same. The shower was a Heath Robinson, home-made affair which enclosed the bather between a brick wall and a shower curtain. The former harboured my cat, who used to sit up there while I showered and peer down at me with a confusion and concern not entirely inappropriate to the venue; the latter played further host to the Cthulhoid mould, here a mystic spray of black dots whose cryptic patterns shifted strangely in the steam. There probably weren't actually rats in the walls, but by gum if there had been they would have fitted right in. About the only thing the whole set-up ever had going for it was water - lots of it, piping hot, and delivered with bracingly bullet-like force from an adjustable shower head at exactly the right height. Over the years, this alone has kept me sane.
In elegiac mood, I now survey the bathroom in the wake of the Army of Reconstruction's mighty efforts. Gone are the days of performing ritual ablutions in a sort of a cross between sunken R'lyeh and the House of Usher: instead, we have a shrine to Tethys. The ceiling is a good foot higher, and the tiles have departed to that hell of taste from whence they came; the whole is painted in a shade called "Moonbeam"2, a pleasing pearly white which harmonises aesthetically with the shower's marble tiles. The shower itself is a Tardis in gleaming glass3, the better to exclude passing draughts while enclosing the bather in (a) a resonant acoustic chamber for singing and (b) gratuitous quantities of steam, and with an enjoyably space-age sliding door. The whole Star Trek feel is continued in the shiny silver highlights to the towel rail, shelves for shampoo, toilet-roll holder and a nifty little wire basket thingy for holding the soap. (In the previous incarnation of the bathroom the soap was a homeless wanderer which tended to lead a complex private life of its own under the bathmat, possibly in hiding from the tentacled frondy things.)
One of my favourite textual threads in A.S. Byatt's Possession is the recurring theme of bathrooms: marvellous, shining, watery, private spaces in which transformations occur, mirrors and people reflect, things shift from solid to liquid to mist.
I'm going to have another shower now. And possibly grow fins.
1 Not really.
2 In the lowest circles of Hell, just above the sticky vats of molten syrup reserved for the people who write the inscriptions in greetings cards, is the special place set aside for the misanthropic imbeciles who create the names for paint shades.
3 Although not as yet, alas, equipped with any incarnation of the Doctor.
 | Bunny Threat Level: well, thundering sinus headache all today so no actual work as such, but on the upside Amazon promise they've dispatched the volume of criticism I need for this next chapter, so possibly holding in the yellow. |
