The Men in Baths Thread

[Guest]

[Fangirl Three]

[Nightjar]

[Guest]

[Nightjar]

I'm reckoning that CT wasn't hoping for the cast of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly smoking cheroots in rusty tin baths.

[cosmictanya]

No, indeed. It's a rich seam to be mined.

[cosmictanya]

[cosmictanya]

[cosmictanya]

Do we all have bathing preferences and rituals here? I can't relax in baths next to tiled walls. I find physical proximity to grouting absolutely repulsive as a sensory experience.

I like a good hour in a hot shower to think and chill out. As a child we lived in a flat with no heating and dodgy walls. Showers had to be planned in advance and enjoyed to their maximum offering. You'd generally need four to six towels placed in the hallway at the adjacent wall, to soak up the water pouring through the wall. And someone on hand to do that. It was too cold to step out from under the water and do it yourself.

So now I prioritise a nice long shower. For a while now I've been weighing up having a proper steam shower installed. I don't like the bath-cum-shower units - so ugly. But I don't have the space to have a dedicated steam shower only unit.

Friends with teenage sons had me filled with foreboding about what could be coming. As luck would have it, I and my direct debit billing have the opposite problem. My son spends inordinate amounts of time in there. Three hours is not unknown. He has a preference for a quick utility shower, followed by a bath with a cleansing focus, and then a relaxing shower, with a minute or so blast of freezing water to finish, and then a final relaxing bath.

Needless to say, I've had to form closer friendships with a couple of neighbours just so I can use their loo during these nightly marathons. Maybe we're not so green after all here - but we do use candles far more than other people seem to. However, I understand - when it comes to bathing we all have our thing.

I enjoy the sight of a man in a bath, but not with me. I like to bathe alone. For a time I dated a charming young French guy who was schizophrenic and had questionable hygiene as a side effect of his mental ill health. So he would shower while I directed proceedings from the loo while smoking. "Again under the arms" I'd say. Or "retract your f******n fully". Stuff like that. He was very skilled and well endowed so it seemed worthwhile until his stalker-with-knife-obsession tendencies flared up.

I ended up having the most dreadful argument in the street with his mother. Possibly the roughest Frenchwoman I've ever laid eyes on - and I've spent a fair amount of time in the less attractive parts of Marseille. She was so rude to me.

He could never understand why I wouldn't get in with him.

[cosmictanya]

Lovely looking, but if that was my shoot I'd have insisted on him being visibly wet to the neck at least.

[cosmictanya]

As I said, I rich seam of a subject. For me this was one of the most erotic scenes ever broadcast on British television. The Mr Darcy coming out of a lake nonsense passed me by entirely - I remember girls at school swooning over it and knowing there and then we could never truly be friends. 

But that is a scene. Inspired by The Crown was listening to an old Desert Island Disc recording of Princess Margaret, who observed that at 15, 'ones eyes are rather waiting to be opened to the beauties of life'. I agree, so well put - but it's important that our eyes remain open. I found this scene so powerful I recommended the episode to a friend who was in a miserable marriage, but has since left her dreadful husband and is slowly beginning to enjoy life as a 37 year old divorcee. After a slow start when she appeared for a night out in the south of France at my invitation, wearing a yellow dress and a pair of brown Jesus sandals, she's almost back to being the tart I once knew - with a more adult seasoning.

Her ex husband btw, is now with someone called Nicole - I met her this summer by accident and she had acrylic nails. Need more be said! They have each found their level.

Such is the power of the right man in the right bath.

[Helium]

[cosmictanya]

Yes. You can't go wrong with Al. Unless you're talking a young Robert Di Nero.

[cosmictanya]

[Helium]

[Helium]

Chris Evans needs more scenes in bath tubs.

[Fangirl Three]

I hate Chris Evans. I want to see more gifs where he drops his device into the bath and gets electrocuted and dies.

[Helium]

[cosmictanya]

Yes, he should have many more bathtub scenes. I do think those images of him make my point about grouting and tiling for me. There is real difference in mood between the two sets of pictures.

[Nightjar]

I have just this moment offered to refit and grout a woman's bathroom tiles.

Coincidence, or something altogether more sinister?

[Sponsored content]