Its about the bathroom…

He was useful for all sorts of plumbing things, Bob Beck.

It would be the very early 1970′s when he removed our bath never to replace it ever again.

“You need a shower” he’d told our dad in The New Inn one Friday night

“Cheeky bugger, I had a bath last Sunday” our father retorted and indeed he had and indeed that was all that was required of people in the 1970′s, you had a bath on a Sunday night and had “a good swill” in the sink for the rest of the week until it was Sunday again.

“No” said Bob patiently, “I mean your bathroom would look nice with a shower in it”

And our dad stood at the bar for a while dreaming of what our bathroom would look like with with a shower in it for showers were few and far between in the 1970′s, in fact having a shower in your house, or bungalow, was unheard of and very avent garde, the only showers I’d ever seen were the ones at school and they were cold and involved lots of bullying and a kick up the arse from Sinbad the gym master to get you to run around under them.

This shower was something different for this was the latest thing for 1970′s houses, a shower cubicle.

Yes I know that we have shower cubicles now, but you won’t see one like the one we had in the 1970′s, not until its retro-cool to have metal cabinets in your bathroom that makes it look like someone has put a commercial walk-in refridgerator in your bathroom.

Bob Beck had taken the shower cubicle out of “some old jew-boys house” in Alwoodley, a crude description which meant that he’d been working in that well-to-do suburb of Leeds where all of the tailoring manufacturers had built their architect designed show houses, Bobs client had obviously grown tired of abluting in a commercial walk-in refridgerator every morning and gone back to having a bath, so Bob had snaffled the shower cubicle.

For a mere pittence our dad allowed Bob to remove our bath and replace it with a commercial walk-in refridgerator upon which our mother hung a curtain in the open doorway and from that point on we showered rather than bathed, how posh were we – so posh actually that when visitors came we took them straight to the bathroom and with a flourish threw open the door and a “ta-da !!!”, after a few seconds they’d ask why we didn’t have a bath and after a few more seconds when they looked behind the bathroom door they’d ask why we had a commercial walk-in refridgerator in our bathroom, boy were they impressed when we showed them that it was really a shower.

So we showered rather than bathed and for a while all was fine in the world and our dad was very pleased with himself, especially when Bob Beck told him one Friday night in The New Inn that showering was far, far cheaper than bathing – that was the sort of thing that our dad liked to hear about, the saving of his money.

But then one day we all began to notice that small patches of rust were appearing insde the metal shower cabinet, its quite normal apparently for metal to rust when its untreated and then exposed to water and air, as indeed our posh shower cubicle was.

So our dad painted the inside of our metal shower cubicle with Hammerite paint.

I don’t know how far Hammerite paint has travelled in its domination quest of the world but let me explain what Hammerite paint is – its applied more like treacle than paint, thick and goo-ey, and in its early incarnation, like the 1970′s for instance, it dried to a “crackle enamel” finish, that is it didn’t dry smooth like paint but with a rippled surface rather like someone had spent forever tapping your metal shower cubicle with a small ball-pein hammer.

Of course none of this would really have mattered, we would not have cared one fig if the inside of our shower cubicle had been painted in Hammerite if it had only been painted in, lets say, white. But unfortunately Hammerite didn’t seem to manufacture a white version of Hammerite at that time so our dad bought the nearest colour to white in the Hammerite range – gold.

When he finished painting the inside of the metal shower cubicle he looked like a James Bond baddie, gold from head to foot, and when the Hammerite had eventually dried enough for the shower to be utilised once again (several days later) we all had to wear sunglasses to shower for stepping into the shower cubicle hurt your eyes, in fact we were warned by our dad to turn off the bathroom light if we were intending to shower for any extraneous light inside that metal cubicle would be multiplied by a factor of several hundred and you could easily suffer third degree sunburn – we had to have blackout curtains fitted in the bathroom and shower in complete darkness.