Shower Power

Another pleasant side effect of my increased gardening activities has been getting very dirty. I mean proper mucky; a kind of seven-year-old-just-finished-playing-football-for-three-hours-in the-park kind of filthy. Most days I return from the garden with grime under my fingernails, the hairs on my legs dyed soil-brown and a comedy mud and dust moustache. This has led to some brilliant George and Mildred moments between me and Mrs Custard with her threatening to hit me with a rolling pin should I tread any of my dirt into her clean floors.

There is something undeniably satisfying about rinsing-off well-earned muck in a hot shower – something which got me thinking about other great shower times. So, because it’s the end of the year and everyone is doing lists, and because I haven’t done one for a while, here is the Mint Custard Top 10 Best Times to Have a Shower:

1. Post-23 hour flight from Manchester to Australia when the in-flight booze has worn off and turned to hangover
2. When it’s 30 degrees in the shade at midnight and sleep is proving elusive
3. Scoring first go in the bathroom when you live in a share house with five others (and their various sleeping-over partners) and the hot water tank can only cope with three good showers
4. When you’ve just had your hair cut at the barbers and they haven’t tucked the cloak in properly
5. When you’re getting ready to go out on a Saturday night and you’ve got the music on and all the doors open
6. When you’ve just carried five bags of groceries home via the bus and a steep hill in the cold wet sleet of winter
7. Walking to work on your 30th birthday without an umbrella listening to Spring Rain by the Go-Betweens on your walkman-type device whilst the heavens open but you’re so happy you dance across George Street in Sydney being sure to stomp in every enormous puddle*
8. Getting home after a three-day music festival where your sleeping bag got soggy and you had pointy rocks for a mattress
9. ‘I once had a shower with two American girls’ (Preposterous Tales by I, Ludicrous, 1987)**
10. Straight after you’ve dyed your hair and it all bleeds out like Janet Leigh in Psycho…
    

* this one is hard to replicate I'll admit, but believe me, it definitely deserves to be at #6

** I can’t claim to have done this one either, but I think we all have our own preposterous tales to tell