Having a Soak

Having a Soak ©

By Michael Casey

I’m going to have a soak in a minute, I may even shave too, it could even become a SSS, or rather SBS, you can work out the letters for yourself. I did once say Americans never have a bath to some of our touring musician guests, before I explained we knew they preferred to shower, showers not baths. I had to show them the fiddly way the bath/shower attachment worked, and yes they did give me a funny look until I explained.

I prefer baths myself,  and on that note I’m going to have my bath right now, I shall return like a prune to finish this story. See the great lengths I go to just to give you the right flavour to my writing. If anybody wants to give me some Stella   Artois I’ll willingly write about that, its  months since I had any alcohol, but now I have to wallow like a hippo in my bath while I listen to Country Music drifting from the tv nearby.

Its 20 hours later, no I haven’t been in the shower, sorry I mean bath that long, I was tired after my soak so I went to bed. I’m now going to resume my soaking story. I read somewhere that Bobby Kennedy used to have meetings while he had a soak, did the stenographer sit at the edge of the bath? Now all the Political Families seem to have ended in USA, perhaps they have all dissolved in their bathwater.

As you soak you get to muse on life and the universe and why is your razor always blunt, I do live with 3 girls and a female cat after all. Why are there so many different shampoos, pre-shampoo, shampoo, post-shampoo and then there is conditioner. And conditioner for this hair or that hair, normal, greasy, thin or thick. In the old days all there was was carbolic soap, and I used to wash my carbolics with it. You had to pick out the small curly hairs first then rinse the soap under the hot tap before you started to wash yourself, it was a red kind of coloured  soap, with a strong smell to it, but everybody always knew who’d washed recently because of the smell.

As you turn into a prune you examine the state of the ceiling and remind yourself it is time to decorate, in our case we just have, as we hope to sell our house. My daughter has a friend who is very artistic, so I thought he was exactly the man to be our housepainter or rather bathroom decorator, his name is Mr Hitler, only joking his name is Anon. Mind you many years ago when my sister was doing her year abroad as part of her degree she did meet Mr Hitler, no my sister is not in her 90s. This Mr Hitler happened to be a French café owner, yes really.

Submerging yourself under the water is fun in the bath, if you have a decent size bath you can put your head beneath the water, almost like a baptism but you are in the nude and there is nobody applauding you and saying welcome to the Christian faith. Your hearing goes funny and it’s just like in films where people are drowning , then after counting to as high as number as you can to see just how long you can hold your breath, you emerge like Archimedes, triumphant and spilling water all over the bathroom floor.

I am lucky as our bathroom floor is concrete, and I am no Cadbury’s flake girl, even if I shaved my legs. More like a sheep dog who has been dipped I shake the water off myself,  the scene frightens our neighbours as I never close the blinds, I am a sight to behold, or rather enough to put people off their dinner. Screams fill the air as I slowly get dressed, only to cease when I switch the bathroom light off. Though I am told old Mrs Morecombe from number 96 does enjoy  the sight, she does have  a powerful pair of binoculars after all, her husband was a seaman.

So I leave the bathroom, as I lie on my bed dreaming of a publishing deal with a radio deal too screams drift to me, you pig  you wet the floor, why you no clear up, mop up your mess, I’m going to have the bath removed and only have a shower. Then you cannot wet my beautiful floor. She forgets I’m a bad shot when I use the toilet,  we have such a beautiful life together, if only we had 2 bathrooms, then she’s  be twice as happy.