The Efficacy of the Nice Hot Relaxing Bath Examined
Or: maybe I should have got a massage.
I’m keen. I’m naked. I watch the water rise in the bathtub. The bright green bubbly stuff I threw in to hide the brown stains creates a white foamy slick across the surface.
I’m going to have a nice, hot, relaxing bath. It’s going to be great.
Because I need to relax. Big Time. Everyone keeps telling me. I’m stressed to the eyeballs. My best friend says I look weird. Chillax time, she says. Before I snap.
So here I am. But it’s really cold in here. How come we put the receptacle for the nice, hot, relaxing bath in the coldest room in the house? It’s all chrome and steel and tiles and glass bricks. I’m freezing!
Finally, it’s full, almost to the top. Taps off, I step one foot in. Just for a moment, it seems like I’ve done it, the water is just right! I’m Goldilocks! Then I look down and see the flames rolling up my leg as the intense heat feels like it’s flaying the flesh from my calf.
Too hot! Again! Twenty-seven years of running baths, never got the temperature right. I have to put some cold water in, but there’s no room.
Sacrifice a limb time. The leg comes out. My arm goes in, fingers outstretched, searching, because where did the idiots who designed baths put the plug? At the bottom, beneath the boiling water.
My arm is like a Popsicle in a microwave, but I find the plug. I’m pulling but it won’t budge. I’m yanking with all my strength but it’s like Satan is underneath, sucking it back, screaming at me “THIS IS MY PLUG!”.
It finally comes free and flies across the room, the bath begins to drain. I turn on the cold tap and dance an undignified jig as I try to deal with the dichotomy of my frozen nether regions and my red hot limbs.
Enough cold! The plug goes back in. I put one foot in. Then the other. All good. No flames. It’s hot, but I can bear it.
Then I perform the ultimate temperature test for a man…I slowly lower myself down so that my testicles dip slowly into the water. After my first child was born I was told that the elbow is the best thermometer. Bullshit. It’s our balls. Try and use them to test a baby’s bath, though, and see how you go!
I’m in. Almost. My shoulders are underwater, but my knees are poking up like twin Kilimanjaros. I wriggle upwards. They go under. My shoulders freeze. I’m in and out of the water, trying to keep them all warm, and I realize I’m doing an aerobic workout in my nice, hot, relaxing bath.
I force myself to stay still. Relaaax. Then the heat from the water gets me. I can hardly breathe. The water’s so hot!
I’m going to pass out and drown. I’ll drown in here and then they’ll find me, a dead, wrinkled prune of a rigor mortis man.
I scramble out of the bath and stand there, dripping and cold, goosebumps erupting as I hug myself, staring at the slopping water.
And I smile. It works every time. My shoulders fall down into my fluffy towel. How good is it to be dry? I climb into my dressing-gown. And warm?
I wipe the condensation from the mirror, see myself reflected. I’m Frankenstein’s monster, alive.
I’ll be back again tomorrow night. Fighting for calm.
