in praise of outdoor baths and mid-summer immodesty
a heated dispatch from the roof deck
Two weekends ago, on the drive home from Somerset, a friend and I took a detour to Amersham where I picked up a long galvanised tin pot I’d bought at auction on eBay. The guy who sold it to me insisted it was a repurposed animal feeding trough, when it’s clearly an antique bathtub for poor people, complete with a reclined back. Maybe he was worried I wouldn’t pay £28 for it if I knew that? Anyway, I did.
We chucked in the boot then carried it up to the second floor roof deck of my London house and set it down next to the outdoor shower, which I’ve stopped using since the tap bust. It was sweltering, so later that evening I put the garden hose in and filled the tub to the brim with cool water and slipped into it to read and watch the sunset. It was, quite possibly, the single best idea I’ve ever had in my life.
Why is everyone so obsessed with gardens and pools and beach holidays when the luxury item we should all be coveting is a £28 outdoor bathtub for poor people?
Every day since then I’ve been bathing on the roof deck. Our Victorian terrace is set up high over looking a four track railway. (I can tell the difference between the Bakerloo line tube to Elephant and Castle, the Overground to Euston and the commuter train to Birmingham by sound alone.) It’s not an ideal location obviously, living on a train track. But over the years I’ve grown to actually enjoy it. Most of the houses on this side of our street sell to other people who’ve lived on the railway too and because of this know that with double glazed windows it’s really not that bad. You get used to the train sounds after at while and eventually, you get weirdly attached to it. Trains have a certain chundering rhythm and romance. They come and they go like thoughts and white clouds across a clear summer sky. Sometimes I think I could never live anywhere else.
One of the other benefits of living on the track, I’ve discovered, is that from the upper floors of the house you get long, deep views, which is another rare luxury. Outside of parks and roundabouts, in London, brick walls are everywhere, hemming in your perspective on the world. There’s a claustrophobia to cities that drives many people mad. Tiny rooms, crowded tubes, narrow streets, endless queues. The railroad, by contrast, feels like peering over the edge of an enormous cavern. There’s a family of foxes with kits in the brush on either side of the tracks and plenty of songbirds nesting this time of year. Because there are no neighbours directly overlooking the roof, it feels both wildly open and private at the same time. There’s a sense of expansive outdoor solitude, which is very hard to find anywhere in a big city. Because of this (to the abject horror of my English sons), I’m somewhat immodest about my rooftop ablutions, first with the shower and now with the tin pot.
If some half-in-the-bag commuter en route to Birmingham gets a split-second thrill from my C-section scar, more power to the guy, I tell the kids, prompting gagging sounds and cries of, Oh Muuuuum stop!!!
Speaking of nudity,