SHOWERS

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Why are hotel showers always rubbish? At home I have a shower set to the temperature I like, so I can just flick it on and step in. I like a shower first thing in the morning – it helps me feel awake. Even if someone else has altered the shower setting, it is usually quite easy to reset it to what I want. Hotel showers are something else. First of all, even trying find out how to switch them on is a challenge worthy of a Krypton Factor type competition. Some seem to be fixed to the taps on the bath so that trying to activate one sets off the other instead. Temperature control is impossible and sadistic. The water will veer from hypothermia inducing cold to molten lead with barely any stops in between. Worse, when you finally get the controls to a tolerable setting, more by chance than by intentional methodical approach, and you then switch of the shower, it doesn’t save the settings you made. You have to go through the whole palaver again the next time you try to have a shower. Water pressure moves from pathetic trickle to police water cannon and Niagara Falls with no stages in between too. Water seems to come out of the shower nozzles like red-hot needles. Sometimes it actually hurts. The other problem is the shower cubicle itself, which rarely contains the water fully on the inside, or allows you to hang towels within reach so that you don’t have to slosh across the bathroom to get one. At some hotels I have spent a week trying to fathom the mysteries of the shower system – usually made worse if they put up notices that try to explain how the system works. There is usually more practical advice in the Gideon Bible they also provide. At a few hotels I have figured things out eventually, but at some the shower system has been so bad that I have used the bath instead, which is usually a tub designed for acid bath murderers – as dissolving in acid is the only way you’ll get a whole adult body into the water. Do hotels really think all people who check in are less that four foot six? Arthur Chappell