Baths are great - deeply-relaxing, deeply-cleansing; and you can read - or sleep - if that way inclined (and I often am).
And very traditionally English!
After all, Samuel Pepys's wife once had a bath; so he complained (admittedly Pepys himself never did).
But showers? - Pah!
You Have To Stand Up! 'Nuff said.
But also; unless the house is very warm, there is an unpleasant always contrast perceptible between the water warmth, and the colder air around.
Baths are like rapping: Americanization of the worst kind.
(In an act of silent protest; I had daily baths during my sweltering month living in Texas one September).
And the expense, my dear boy!
Across three decades, I have spent... well, I have lost count; but some tens of thousand quid on having showers installed, re-installed, re-re and re-re-re installed - and repaired, and not-repaired - and still they leak.
Once the house needed major surgery due to a long-term undetected leak that had caused "structural issues".
Properly accounted; each shower taken in our house therefore costs at least several pounds each (at the worst eras, many tens Sterling per drenching)... never mind the price of hot water.
And all this time I have been lolling in my baths and therefore don't receive the (dubious) benefit of being-sprayed.
That’s funny because in movies it’s only ever bathtubs that leak or overflow.
ReplyDelete@Mia - Most movies (and nearly all of those worth watching) are made in the USA...
ReplyDeleteThe longer I read this blog, it seems the more I know about you ;). It’s almost like we’re brothers
ReplyDeleteI haven't had access to a bath in years. I used to love them. I seriously asked a friend if I could use his bath a few years ago. He giggled and treated it as a joke so I let it go. Everything is showers now.
ReplyDelete@Mal - I am sorry to hear that you are thus deprived.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a student, it was possible to have a bath with clean hard white towel in the Student's Union for some nominal fee (10p?) - the baths were enormous things, with infinite quantities of very hot water.
Another such was when I was a Resident Don living in Durham Castle - my (personal) bath could be filled in a few minutes due to very hot water at astonishingly high pressure; and was so long and deep I could literally float in it (despite being 6ft tall and not thin).
Since I first got central heating with on-demand gas boilers to heat the water - whenever I wanted, without notice (this was several decades ago), I have always enjoyed baths.
When I was a kid, it was necessary to wait about an hour for an electric immersion heater to warm a tankful - and sometimes it would run-out while the bathwater was still tepid - plus the bath could not be topped-up with hot water while you were in it, and there was no heating in the bathroom...
Well, in those days (except in summer), baths were nothing like such a pleasant experience; indeed often they were more of an ordeal.
I have a 4 bath, 4,000 sq ft house in a pretty nice town in the American Midwest, and it has only 1 undersized bathtub that essentially stopped working a year after we moved in. I have four kids who can count the number of baths they’ve had on one hand. It’s the highlight of visits to grandparents and hotel stays for us.
ReplyDeleteHopefully we can rectify this in time for grandchildren :/
@Mia - It certainly seems that it is a minority who prefer baths. In my family, the other members exist on an almost exclusive diet of showers (which is why we spend so much on maintaining them), with baths indulged as no more than an annual event.
ReplyDelete' very hot water at astonishingly high pressure'
ReplyDeleteIn my college days, our boathouse (I was a rower) had not been renovated since it was built c.1899. The showers were a prodigious example of Victorian construction/engineering: so much water, so much steam. Wonderful.
In my last year, that changed: from the magnificent to the (utterly) insipid, as usual.