Snarkattack

For the past seven years, I’ve been chronically depressed, and oh the trials and tribulations I’ve encountered. Some horrendous, but others as I’m about to explain, not so bad. In fact, if it weren’t for being sick, some (selected) wonders would have remained completely unknown to me. Weird how that happens.

Some boring background first: it was coming onto my third year of being sick. A struggling, (mainly) self-supporting university undergraduate, I was forced to accept defeat and crawl home to the parental fold. This left me with some money to play with, for the first time in a very long time. Not for food, or prescribed texts, or sheet music, or rent.

So armed with some cash and determined to find a non-pharmaceutical way to alleviate my many depressive symptoms, I decided a good way to go was by trialling various bath products. I’d decided that I was going to give regular bathing for relaxation purposes a bit of a revival. Would it work?

Ah, the humble tub! Why the hell had I ignored it for so long? I came from England, where the bathtub was all there was. No shower cubicles, or shower heads (many fangled shower-like attachments now exist, but not 20 or so years ago). Before you ask, yes, we were in the habit of bathing more than once a week, despite living in England, so none of those jokes.

When my family first moved to Australia, the notion of a bathroom having both a tub and a shower cubicle seemed like pure genius to me. I was only eight at the time: to a kid straight out of Thatcher’s England, the bath-shower combination seemed excessive and opulent, in a cheesy Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous kind of way. Oh those 80s.