Daily Mail

Oh, the bliss of bath time!

As an MP lands in hot water for saying he spends an hour in the tub every morning, QUENTIN LETTS comes clean . . .

- by Quentin Letts

ONE of the most engaging stories in scientific lore is that of the Ancient Greek mathematic­ian and inventor Archimedes and how he stumbled on his principle.

The stereotype of boffins is that they make their great discoverie­s after hours of toil in a laboratory, knuckle to fevered brow. Yet our friend Archimedes was taking a bath when the lightbulb went ‘ping!’ in his brain. ( Not that lightbulbs had been invented in 3rd century BC Sicily, but you know what I mean.)

There he sat in his tub, quite possibly after a hard day’s thinkin’, a home-fashioned loofah of olive branches perhaps in one hand while he pom-pom-pommed a popular tune of the day. For all we know, he may even have had a few twigs swirling round his bath water, beaching on his pot belly as he pretended that they were Phoenician warships. Which of us has not played warships in the bath?

As Archimedes luxuriated in the peace and soapy solitude, he noticed that the water level had risen. The twiggy warships were lifted by the tide! Thus was the physical law of buoyant force made apparent and Archimedes, forgetting his modesty, leapt from his bath water without so much as a towel and went haring out into the world at large shrieking: ‘Eureka!’ (Ancient Greek for: ‘I have found it!’)

Perhaps Archimedes was the inspiratio­n for MP Tim Loughton (Con, East Worthing and Shoreham), who this week told an audience at the Palace of Westminste­r that he spends an hour in his bath every morning.

Mr Loughton, co-chairman of the All-Party Parliament­ary Group on Mindfulnes­s, said he spent his bath-time ‘just thinking about things’. He added that taking a bath is, for him, ‘like going to the gym for the mind’, and he is of the belief that ‘one of the greatest causes of stress in the world was the invention of the shower’ because showers do not permit for so much contemplat­ion.

Cromwellia­ns among us will quickly assail Mr Loughton — a handsome and shinily clean fellow. It will be said that he is a sloth and that he should spend his mornings in a more productive manner, befitting a virtuous tribune of the people. But I admire his position (which, as we know, is horizontal, covered in hot suds).

Saddam Hussein may have led the Baath Party in Iraq in the bad old days. Now we have Mr Loughton with his Bath Party and he gets my vote. I hope he doesn’t get into hot water for what he has said. Well, not that sort of hot water.

SERIOUSLY, is there anything more heavenly than a long soak in the bath? Sir Winston Churchill thought not.

He would have them drawn by his valet, Inches, and when prime minister he’d occasional­ly dictate letters while soaping himself. The secretarie­s would sit just outside the door, trying to take an accurate note amid all the sploshes and growly subterrane­an bubblings.

In World War II, owing to rationing of fuel, it was ordained that hot baths should be no more than 5in deep. Even the royal Family followed this Spartan edict. Yet, as his biographer John Perry puts it: ‘Churchill never personally felt the need to sacrifice’.

He would take two deep, exceedingl­y hot baths a day, filled initially to 98f (as checked with a thermom- eter wielded by the indomitabl­e Inches) and increased to 104f once Sir Winston was launched.

The effect of all those baths was not only to create a cherubic prime minister with the most perfectly pink complexion, but also to soothe the woes and worries of his office. All the fuel needed to heat that water was surely a legitimate contributi­on to the war effort.

The one worry we might have about Mr Loughton and his hourlong soaks is wrinkles. If you stay more than ten minutes or so in the water, you do tend to develop ‘washerwoma­n’s hands’. other parts of the anatomy are not immune to this effect. If ever we hear a ‘Eureka!’ emerge from the Loughton bathroom of a morning, it may be because he has only just located his shrivelled apparatus.

I was brought up in a Victorian house that still had its original baths. one was so deep it came up to the waist and was at least 6ft long — it was more like a swimming pool. You could submerge yourself completely and pretend to be deepsea diver Jacques Cousteau.

My parents ran a boarding school for boys and when it was bathtime for the younger pupils, we could get three of them at a time into that bath. Modern ofsted inspectors would no doubt strongly disapprove of such goings-on, but the children loved it.

My public school, Haileybury, had two tubs which stood side-byside in an open-plan bathing area with a stone floor. one of the favourite pastimes was to fill the baths and then whoosh jets of the water out of the back if anyone entered the room in dry clothes.

Considerin­g Mr Loughton’s morning ablutions, I feel nothing but envy. An hour’s soak a day! At present, I tend to take my baths only at weekends, restrictin­g myself to stressed-out showers on busy week days.

But to lie back in a skin-pricklingl­y hot bath, senses wafted by fragrant salts while the wireless plays classical music and the week’s work is done, is utter bliss.

And is it ever better than at the end of a day’s walking or skiing, just after you’ve removed your boots? Bisto!

The only drawback is that so few hotels in today’s ski resorts have decent-sized baths. Instead, you are offered a tub not much bigger than a kitchen sink and you have to sit in it like a jockey, shivering.

My mother, now in her 80s, is firmly of the opinion that no major life crisis can not be at least partly ameliorate­d by a long, hot bath.

THEY are sometimes said to have romantic possibilit­ies, but I have never really gone along with that.

My wife once invited herself to join me in the bath (cue the old question: ‘Do you want the taps or shall I have them, darling?’) but I am afraid I quickly tired of the idea, made my excuses and left her to her hippo-ish splashing.

The great thing about a bath is that it is a time for selfishnes­s, when you really can stare into your own tummy button — and give it a good sluicing. Gosh, mine is deep.

The Americans go bigger on showers. Admittedly, they know how to build them with a decent, pulverisin­g torrent of water rather than the feeble trickle of most British models, yet a shower still seems drearily utilitaria­n.

our continenta­l friends sometimes seem keen on neither showers nor baths, but let us say no more on that for fear of upsetting the Brexit negotiatio­ns.

But a bath, a bath, a bath’s the thing. You are sovereign — make that admiral — of all you survey. You can have hours of fun watching the water encroach on your kneecaps — there go the Maldives to global warming again!

You can plan the menu for dinner and dream of your next holiday. Some like to read in a bath; some will lie there smoking a cigar.

others will bathe to the light of scented candles, though not I, for they make me sneeze. More fun is in trying try to produce a satisfying, cork- from- bottle ‘ pop!’ by withdrawin­g your big toe from the cold-water tap.

And most of all, when floating there in watery limbo, your arms and legs feeling half their normal weight, you can forget the gravity and the pressures of this vortex we call life.

Fill her up, Inches.

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