Chapter 7
Lesson 7: There are many things that romanticized British dramas hide from you—like the shocking stupidity of British bathrooms.
Bridget Jones Tally:
lights—0
hot water—0
fucks to give—about a million
That night I waged war against my own en suite bathroom.
I had longed for nothing so much as a hot shower to wash away the days of grime and festering indignities from my sagging
bones. Half comatose, I fumbled for the light switch on the wall inside of this, the blackest of all soulless abysms. Left
side: nothing. Right: zippo. So I checked the wall outside of the doorjamb. Nothing but an empty stretch of switchless wasteland.
I checked inside a second time, but found nothing.
Then something tapped my face and flew away! In the dark of that old place, it could have been anything: fly, roach, restless spirit, feather held aloft by some pantless pervert. I felt my face and found nothing had landed there. Then it tapped again! I flailed my arms in front of me and connected with a string. I grabbed it and fondled the end, which was capped in a little plastic Hershey’s Kiss. Was it a trap? I tugged experimentally. Suddenly there was light, and I sighed with relief when I found no Lowlands Norman Bates waiting for me there.
Hurriedly, I peeled away the layers of garments sticking to my unwashed skin and hopped into the shower. There didn’t seem
to be any knob to pull or twist but rather a white plastic box high on the wall, sporting a number of buttons and dormant
lights, and a white plastic showerhead attached to a long, ropey umbilical cord. I pressed what looked like it might be an
on button. The coldest water, piped directly over four and a half thousand miles from the snowcapped peaks of the Himalayas,
spat and dribbled incontinently onto my nakedness.
I crushed myself into the cold glass corner, trying to spare as many inches of bare skin as I could, and waited it out. And
then I waited. And waited some more. Was it getting warmer? Or was that just the freezing hot burn of frostbite? Nope. If
anything, it was getting colder.
I pressed the buttons on and off, but to no avail. I looked for knobs. There was a dial that you could spin with markers for
hot and cold, but this seemed to exist purely for mockery’s sake. It was after at least ten minutes that I finally accepted
defeat. If I positioned my body under that, it was sure to be the last thing I ever did.
I turned it off, cried a little bit, and then used the one free, individually wrapped wet wipe I had gotten from the airplane.
I scrubbed at my most odiferous areas in receding order of cleanliness, folding the rectangle over and over again, until it
was a postage stamp clutched between two pincerlike fingers with which I dabbed at my nethers.
I wondered then if all the water was cold—perhaps there was a hot water curfew? But it was only 8:35 at night, so I tried the sink tap, turning the left of two small spigots for the hot water. Lo and behold, water gushed forth, and in no time at all it was as if fresh from a boiling kettle. Thank God! At least I could wash my face and soothe my throbbing temples.
I realized quickly that there was an issue here too. Because of course there was. It was so very hot that it was cooking my
skin from the bone, and I couldn’t stand to cup it in my hands, let alone splash my face in it. Rather than one central faucet
that combined both hot and cold, from which one could adjust the temperature with a turn of the knob to better suit the limits
of the human body, there were two small separate taps, each with a knob that spoke only on, off, and pressure wash.
Why , I asked myself. Why would they do this? Why, when we can fly a man to the moon, and Netflix can send nonstop bingeable entertainment
through the air with the single click of a button—why has Britain continued on in the dark ages of plumbing when the technology for combined
taps exists? I turned on the right spigot and got the Himalayan water. I cupped my hands, moving them quickly between the
two faucets to try to mix the water—searing, glacial, searing, glacial—and splashed my face while I sucked in air and shouted
obscenities. This did not soothe my nerves.
My hair had gotten wet from the flapping, and I couldn’t sleep with a wet head, so I dug around in my bag and retrieved my
brand-new, purpose-bought, AV-adaptable hair dryer and a round brush for smoothing, so that I wouldn’t look like Don King
in the morning, but was there a power outlet to be found anywhere in the bathroom? Yes. Yes there was. But it had ugly little plugholes and a sign that read shavers only . I tried to jam my dryer in anyway, not caring anymore if I short-circuited the electricity for the entire wretched town,
but it wouldn’t fit, no matter how I pleaded with it.
Again I asked myself, why? I would discover on my trip that there were no power outlets in the bathrooms, in any bathrooms in the whole country, for safety reasons. However, I wondered then, and wonder still: If the entirety of the US is still alive and kicking, and has somehow managed, with their combined IQ average of “bumpkin,” to escape frying themselves into extinction with a great bathroom electrocution pogrom, then surely so too can the UK? Is there nothing to be said for natural selection?
I unplugged my bedside lamp and used the hair dryer in the dark, which didn’t much matter, because the only mirror in the
room was in the bathroom. I ended up looking like a downcast Don King anyway.
I was later informed that there is another white cotton string that dangles from the ceiling, and this must be pulled in order to get hot water in the shower. Was it
near the shower? No. No, it was not. It hung lazily in the corner attached to an unassuming white box on the ceiling the size
of a mouse trap, with no sign or indicator of any kind. Another thing that I learned was that the bathroom is not called a
bathroom, but instead the room—in its entirety—is most often called a “toilet.”
It’s times like these where I sing out in grateful thanks for the Revolutionary War.