OK, I know English plumbing tends to be bad because buildings tend to be older etc etc. We’ve done the topic before.
But fer fucks sake this is getting me down. I would be more confident of finding a shower that had hot water, enough water, and was reasonably adjustable in a free of charge Australian camping ground than in a $300 a night English hotel. So far on this trip I’ve come across a shower that produced little water, a shower that went from scalding to freezing if you so much as touched the adjustments, and a shower that could do no better than tepid (there was plenty of hot water, the bath was fine, but the shower? Nope). Two out of three showers were in new or recently totally refurbished properties. All three had adjusting systems that I’d never seen before and required you to read the instructions to operate. One was in a property that specifically advertised that it had good showers. (You know you’re in England when you see an ad like that: anywhere else it would be like advertising a hotel rooms on the basis they had fucking beds).
I lived in the UK for three years. I know that my experience on this trip is not anomalous.
It’s not hard, chaps. It’s not rocket science. Come out to Oz or take a trip to the States. We may be damned colonials, but at least we can install a hot water system and shower that fucking works in every home and hotel (probably for a price somewhat less than you Limeys would pay for a round of fucking pints, I shouldn’t wonder, an’ all).
Oh, man, do I ever agree. Basic shower features are not a difficult concept. One knob is hot, the other knob is cold. One knob is hot, the other knob is cold! This is not a system that needs further refinement! Last time I was in London, I half-flooded the bathroom in my hotel room just trying to get the bizarre one-knob shower to provide water that was neither hypothermia-inducing cold nor scald-the-flesh-from-your-bones hot.
I was ultimatly unsuccesful, and as a result, no longer have flesh on my bones.
Nothing makes you feel like a vulnerable foreigner more than standing there naked alternately scalding and freezing yourself, if you can get the damned thing on in the first place after you figure out the New Hip Control System, also with your travelling companion outside the door yelling “Did you get it on yet?”
But they do sometimes have those towel warming radiator things, those are nice when you climb shivering out of the shower because that’s a better alternative than fucking scalding yourself.
Hate to say, I have had the same experience in famous New York hotels… maybe it’s just an old-construction thing… or maybe living in such densely populated areas desensitizes people to all comforts?
I was happily taking a shower in a hotel near the park in London when I heard someone pounding on the door to the room. I climbed out and answered the door, to find an agitated bellhop guy telling me that I was flooding the kitchen. :rolleyes:
I am reminded of an old Hembeck cartoon. The Invisible Woman is on “The Newlywed Game”:
“What’s the most unusual place you’ve made whoopee?”
“The kitchen and the bedroom.”
“Er, we need one answer.”
“That is one answer – I was in the kitchen, Reed was in the bedroom…”
France had its own plumbing eccentricities. Most showers were not showers per se, but a shower head on a flexible tube which one used while sitting in the bathtub. Additionally, the bathtubs were designed for skinny French heinies, and not for fat American rumps. When a chunky American sits in a French bathtubful of water, he creates a substantial water barrier, a canal lock, as it were. If you stay seated in the tub while the water drains, you’ll experience the interesting phenomenon of retaining a reservoir of water behind your back long after the water around your legs is gone. This creates a neat tidal wave when you stand up!
I think a large part of the problem is the conservatism of the UK’s plumbers. My father used to work for a Brit-owned corporation, and as such had a number of English cow-orkers. One of them recently chose to move back to the UK after having spent his professional life here in the States.
Upon returning to the family home they found that, well, it was unsatisfactory. It had only one W.C. and they had the funds to do something about this. So he and his wife hire a plumber and contractor to install a toilet in a small downstairs closet. During the work they had to nearly threaten force to get the people they’d hired to stop trying to convince them to stop wasting money, since ‘No one really needs a second loo in the house.’
Heh. Feelin’ kinda lucky here. In London, shower works fine, and the management warns us if they’re going to meddle with the hot water system. I find that sometimes I need to run the taps a while before the hot water really gets running at night, though.
I guess that reflects the way that stereotypes and prejudice works. For Australians, the English (pommies) have often been the butt of jokes; in other parts of the world, it’s the Polish, or the Irish, or whoever.
Actually, on this topic of English hygeine, i also recall a cartoon that used to do the rounds at one place i worked. It showed a man standing naked and urinating into a fan, which then blew the urine back over his body. The cartoon was entitled “Pommy Shower.”
Finally, in case anyone feels this issue needs clarification, i lived in England for two years and found that English personal hygeine was just as good as anywhere else.
I share the OP’s pain. I live in a London flat that’s not much older than a decade. When I moved in, I had to strip out the old shower and install a new system. It was either that off suffer in the old shower, which was either freezing or flesh-stripping hot.
An Aussie friend of mine refuses to shower in her flat, so she takes off to the gym every morning to use their showers.
OTOH, I was in France at Easter. The place we were staying didn’t have hot/cold taps – just a big push button that you had to keep pressing to get water. There was no temperature cold, so depending on the time of the day it was either freezing (not nice after a day of skiing), or unbearably hot.
I think we actually have some kind of deep-rooted cultural sense of self-loathing that prevents us from installing anything in our houses that would be too comfortable; to do so would be the top end of a slippery slope leading to dangerous softening of the stiff upper lip and catastrophic erosion of the moral fibre.
