It’s the little things in life that keep you grounded. Those objects, habits, sounds and tastes that are significant to you, and let you know the you, you think you are, is still the you that is.
Grounded, yes. But also, those little unimportant things can be a threat and a restraint if jolted from their accustomed places by being denied.
Take, for example, the shower in the changing room of a swimming pool. When I first started using the swimming pool that I go to for my early morning swim each day, the changing room was not very different from the changing room I used when, for one afternoon a week, I had to traipse from my school in Cardiff to the sports ground that we used - a long walk, or a short bus ride away.
We used The Harlequins Ground, as my secondary school was set in concrete and had no playing fields, The Quins had been opened in 1892, it was one of the first multi-sport facilities in Cardiff, serving the residents of the eastern side of the city and situated on the northern side of the Newport Road, and to the south of the suburb of Roath. This is where my school played Rugby in the winter, and Cricket in the summer.
I have no fond memories of this place at all. As a tall boy, I was placed in the second row in rugby at the age of eleven, and there I stayed for all of my time in the school – hating every game that I played. The fact that my father was, in his day, an excellent rugby player and even played for the Possibles against the Probables for inclusion in the Welsh National Side, made my loathing of participation so much worse, and an on-going guilty secret.
I’m not sure that I ever did enough during the games themselves to make a shower a justified ending to the torture, but just scrumming down was exhausting for me, and so a shower was at least relaxing and painless.
The showers were communal and usually hot, so we didn’t have to experience the bracing denial of comfort via icy showers, that seemed to be an essential ingredient in all those public-school stories that were popular at the time. And since my school, although a state secondary, had a timetabled session on a Saturday morning – we had pretentions in that direction!
So, the showers of my youth and those of the pool here in Castelldefels were similar with the exception of the water flow. In my youth you turned the shower on, waited for the water to get warm, showered, and then turned it off. In Castelldefels the showers were time limited. You pressed a button in, adjusted the water mixture and showered, while re-pressing the button as necessary to complete your ablutions.
The trick in communal showers was choosing the shower with the longest water flow, as each of the showers had its own peculiarities.
Given that I had an early swim, it usually meant that when I decided to leave the water, I would enter a generally empty changing room and therefore the choice of shower was mine to make. I cannot remember now if it was the second from the left or the third from the right that was the ‘sweet spot’ of watery abundance, but I can still retexture my frustration if somebody else had got to ‘my’ shower before me. And it took all of the calming power of my post-swim cup of tea to bring my anger level back to containability.
The communal showers are long gone. Our changing room underwent a radical make-over and it is hard to remember what the ur-changing rooms looked like. Our little sauna (closed during the Covid outbreak) never really reopened and was lost in the reworking. We had swish looking lockers installed, stylish lighting, new loos, and a series of individual cubicle shower stalls.
In theory all of these stalls are identical, but they are not. Because of the physical demands of the space, not all the stalls are of the same size and shape, though they look identical from the outside. The shower heads are of the circular ‘rainfall’ type, the temperature of the water is centrally controlled, and the water flow is regulated by a push button. There is a shower soap dispenser in each cubicle.
After a period of research, trying a different stall each day, searching for the elusive ‘extra seconds’ of water from a single push, I settled on the third cubicle on the right (they are divided into two groups of five) and was content.
It was with something of a shock that I turned into ‘my’ cubicle one day to find that a digital display thermometer had been added to the stem of the shower pipe just above the shower head. From a slow start the temperature went upwards, changing colour as it did so, until it reached a satisfactory warmth and turned green – the thermometer read out, not the water.
As I was the only one in the showers at the time, I checked the other stalls, and ‘my’ shower was the only one with a thermometer.
I have since worked out some sort of reason for this. People are paranoid about the temperature of water. Not only of the showers, but also of the pool – and most of the time those who care about these things do not believe the ‘official’ temperature, which for the water is posted in daily reports on the stairs up to the pool. There are also complaints about the warmth of the showers, and I think that the installation of a single thermometer was to give proof positive that the temperature was as was stated.
Which is not to say that all the water flow, duration and temperature are the same in all of the cubicles. Again, after a lengthy period of research I can report that the fifth cubicle on the left (the one nearest to the external pipes) is the one with the greatest flow of water and the highest temperature. The time limit is not great, but I have developed the technique of showering with a fairly constant pressure applied on the button to ensure maximum coverage and comfort!
And woe betide any user who dares to usurp my rights of proprietorship over it! That is the sort of small thing that, usurped by somebody else, can ruin my day!
