Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, 1920-03-31 — John Shaqi
Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, 1920-03-31Various
General
Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, 1920-03-31
Various
English wit and humor -- Periodicals
Again, I like a bathroom where there is an electric bell just above the
bath, which you can ring with the big toe. This is for use when one has
gone to sleep in the bath and the water has frozen, or when one has begun
to commit suicide and thought better of it. Apart from these two occasions
it can be used for Morsing instructions about breakfast to the
cook--supposing you have a cook. And if you haven't a cook a little
bell-ringing in the basement does no harm.
But the most extraordinary thing about the modern bath is that there is no
provision for shaving in it. Shaving in the bath I regard as the last word
in systematic luxury. But in the ordinary bath it is very difficult. There
is nowhere to put anything. There ought to be a kind of shaving tray
attached to every bath, which you could swing in on a flexible arm,
complete with mirror and soap and strop, new blades and shaving-papers and
all the other confounded paraphernalia. Then, I think, shaving would be
almost tolerable, and there wouldn't be so many of these horrible beards
about.
The same applies to smoking. It is incredible that to-day in the twentieth
century there should be no recognised way of disposing of a cigarette-end
in the bath. Personally I only smoke pipes in the bath, but it is
impossible to find a place in which to deposit even a pipe so that it will
not roll off into the water. But I have a brother-in-law who smokes cigars
in the bath, a disgusting habit. I have often wondered where he hid the
ends, and I find now that he has made a _cache_ of them in the gas-ring of
the geyser. One day the ash will get into the burners and then the geyser
will explode.
Next door to the shaving and smoking tray should be the book-rest. I don't
myself do much reading in the bath, but I have several sisters-in-law who
keep on coming to stay, and they all do it. Few things make the leaves of a
book stick together so easily as being dropped in a hot bath, so they had
better have a book-rest; and if they go to sleep I shall set in motion my
emergency waste mechanism, by which the bath can be emptied in malice from
outside.
Another of my inventions is the Progress Indicator. It works like the
indicators outside lifts, which show where the lift is and what it is
doing. My machine shows what stage the man inside has reached--the washing
stage or the merely wallowing stage, or the drying stage, or the exercises
stage. It shows you at a glance whether it is worth while to go back to bed
or whether it is time to dig yourself in on the mat. The machine is
specially suitable for hotels and large country houses where you can't find
out by hammering on the door and asking, because nobody takes any notice.
When you have properly fitted out the bathroom on these lines all that
remains is to put the telephone in and have your meals there; or rather to
have your meals there and not put the telephone in. It must still remain
the one room where a man is safe from that.
A. P. H.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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