Things That Happened

“Things happen after a Badedas bath”.

My brain throws up a lot of crap. Advertising works.

Tentatively stepping into the shower at a friend’s mum’s house, I discovered a bottle of this stuff and then I was back in the ad, there’s a picture of a woman, naked apart from a towel strategically placed and, most likely painfully held there with sellotape, looking out over some idealised Italian vista from a balcony. She had, we were led to believe, just got out of her bath. After which, with the combined effect of the towel strategically placed, the scent of drying bath oil and the idealised Italian vista – things would happen.

And things surely did happen, I imagine. After baths, showers, after the viewing of bafflingly salacious advertisments promoting baths and showers in scented ecstasy, but most, in my case are forgotten. So what causes a brain to remember such pointless detail, yet forget huge chapters of what, if I was ever famous enough to be asked to write it, might have been my autobiography?

Had I been so inclined to seek out this kind of bathing experience in 1971, my innocent, three year old eyes would have been confronted with this:

Where to start? Well, firstly, white trousers for a burglary…surely a schoolboy error. Secondly, I don’t think this woman is even looking at him…follow her gaze. Thirdly…well, just zoom in on that text and draw your own conclusions. “Forget about soap” really breaks the mood I think. But this isn’t the picture I remember. The pose, the towel, the faraway look are all familiar, but the creepy claustrophobia is undermining any intimation of relaxation. I don’t feel good about getting out of a bath if this is what happens next. This woman is in danger. And it’s no good, I can’t forget about soap, I just can’t.

I’m caught between trying to blot out the thing that cleans me and fear of being confronted by an intruder as soon as I try and get dry. I can see why most people converted to showers.

But the picture I remember can’t be found. Google images shows me women gazing through windows at chauffeurs, duelling suitors, a hot air balloon (complete with eager pilot and assistants) on a football pitch and a bloke in full military regalia on a carpet in a ballroom. Men, with towel lowered to the waist, peer at women on horseback and emerging from helicopters. This is all too much action. The woman I remember stood on a balcony and looked out over the sea – empty, calm and blue. The towel didn’t really matter, no one would see her anyway, the sea a thinly veiled continuation of what was presumably some kind of eternal bathing experience.

Perhaps I made up this image, some kind of AI fabrication built from ill-considered fragments of dreams and reality. But the smell, the smell….that remains. Like the smell of old 70s car seats, Primary Schools and the perfumes of exes, it stays in you forever. If there had been music, I’d have remembered that too. The nose and the ears have never failed me. Perhaps it’s the eyes. “My Camera Never Lies” said Bucks Fizz, with conviction that felt good in 1982 and has aged quicker than hairstyles. They’ll be back, but the truth of the image is a concept gone forever, gone the same way as words…except words somehow tell you that themselves, it’s in their nature. Your word, and now your image, against mine.

Yes, things happened, and most of it has disappeared, but what is happening now, was happening then and, in some way happened before the towel lady, was that bath, or the idea of it. I was in it, I smelt the horse chestnuts, the world opened out to me like an Italian idealised vista, and what happened afterwards was somehow contained in the happening at the time. Everyone knows once you get out of a bath, you start looking around and you notice things need doing. If the camera really never lied, we might see a semi naked person gazing despondently at a broken cupboard door, a beeping washing machine, a frivolous blog only half written…