A Ranting Shower

If you think that British people are all prime and proper all the time, you should pop in at ours for a morning shower. Mr. Brit loves his showers (who doesn’t!) and he’s also one of those people that depending on how the first minutes of the day go, the whole day will go either badly or not.

Well, let me tell you. He’s having a bad, bad day today.

Exactly like every morning, I woke him up announcing myself to the world with little dinosaurs noises and stretches. Faking a joyful smile, he got up, put the kettle on the stove for morning tea, he jumped in the shower and…screamed. Yes, screamed.

See, for those of you who aren’t familiar with showers in the States, here’s a crash course: they simply don’t work. When Columbus bumped into the Americas, of all the things he could have forgotten, he forgot to bring a thermostat. Therefore, while in Europe we have well balanced showers at just the right temperatures, in America you either wake up in Mordor, or take a swim in the Arctic Ocean — depending on who flushes the toilet in the building, or if they are brushing their teeth next door.

And the funny part is that you go from magma hot to icy cold by just turning the knobs two millimeters to the left or two millimeters to the right.

Mr. Brit took a stroll down Mordor this morning, and that wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny for him, and it wasn’t funny for me because he started a twenty-minute long rant against American showers and the fact that “these bloody things don’t bloody work, how is it bloody possible that nobody thought of importing a bloody thermostat in this bloody country” and so on and so forth. So much blood was shed in that monologue that any vampire would have died of overfeeding.

And all of this while he was getting on with his morning routine, taking a shower, washing his hair (well the best he could, with now too hot and now too cold water,) getting dressed, setting up the table for breakfast, making a cup of tea.

After twenty minutes, he suddenly stopped. “Good, he’s done” I thought. But instead, he came into the bathroom where I was applying my make up, and pointing his finger at me added: “And since I’m at it: why don’t they add a thermostat to their heaters as well, so they avoid having apartments that are too hot in the winter and too cold in the summer. This just doesn’t make sense to me.” And walked away, still ranting about bloody showers and bloody thermostats.

Well, not sure if that was supposed to be a subliminal message, or just his British way to deal with frustration — but one thing is for sure: I know what to get him as his next birthday present.