There are few delights so complete as the bathtub. Few pleasures to rival its exquisite slowness, its delicious idleness. But it appears that bathing is in decline. A decade ago, the average adult took nine baths a month. This has, according to the latest reports, now dwindled to a mere five. Eleven per cent of families have got rid of their bath altogether.
The enemy, of course, is the shower. The shower is faster and sleeker and smaller, so nimble and so modern. It is also more environmentally friendly — a five-minute shower can use about a third of the water needed for a bath. (Though it is worth pointing out that a power shower can use more water than a bath in those same five minutes. And if you bathe with someone else, or take turns to use the same bath water, you have to rethink the watery mathematics of it all over again.)
But the rise of the shower has been relentless, a sort of upright army marching across the land, while the poor old bathtub has lain trembling in its wake: in 1970, a mere 5% of homes had a shower; today it is 80%. Of course, the shower is a wonderful invention, a reinvigorating, life-affirming, brain-pummelling experience. But it is no bath. And its effect upon the mind and spirit is essentially different.
The world's earliest known bathtub was painted terracotta and dates from around 1700 BC. Furthermore, it was found in the queen's apartments at the palace of Knossos on Crete, and I think this perhaps helps to define the allure of the bath: bathing is a queenly pursuit, the tub itself a gorgeous, curvy, womanly thing. It is indulgence and ritual. It is Cleopatra in milk, it is Flake adverts and Ophelia, it is George Best lolling about among the bubbles with a magnum of champagne and a couple of Miss Worlds. Baths, in short, are sexy.
And while the shower is vital and direct and pleasingly brisk, there is something ceremonial about bathing, something about it that seems to marry us with the human race. In Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing, Katherine Ashenburg notes that: "Like almost all peoples [the Ancient Greeks] bathed as a rite of passage. The first bath of a newborn and his mother was an important event." And further, that: "Both the Greek bride and groom took a ceremonial bath on the eve or the morning of the wedding, washing off their single state and preparing to take on a married identity." A ceremonial shower doesn't carry quite the same symbolism or momentousness.
To some, this kind of ritual rouses something primeval in us, harking back to our very beginnings; supporters of the aquatic ape hypothesis – the theory that our ancestors spent a period of time adapting to a partially aquatic environment – might claim that it resonates with us because we once were submerged in water. To others, the soothing quality of a bath reminds us of the months we passed curled contentedly in our mothers' wombs.
For many of us today, taking a bath retains something of a sense of ritual. It is a remedy to all the bombardments of the modern world, to the chatter and the rush and the noise. It is one of the few times we get to be alone with our minds, reclining in quiet, warm contemplation, enjoying the faint cling of the water, the steam, the scent, the solitariness. A bath has stillness, softness, suppleness, and I believe it brings these qualities to one's thoughts.
Dickens once explained the charm of the shower: "I think it is of service to me as a Refresher – not as a taker out, but as a putter in of energy." The bath, I would counter, is a putter in of thought. After all, Archimedes never exclaimed Eureka in the shower, now, did he?
How to have the perfect bath
1) Run a very deep bath (slightly too hot).
2) Add too much bubble bath.
3) Pour a large glass of wine (red).
4) Choose a book – not too heavy (in either sense of the word).
5) Lock the door.
