I am reminded of the joke about the tomcat and the skunk
Related:
From 3 days ago:
Four out of five women don’t shower every day
www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3260423/posts
From 2007:
Six weeks without a wash: The soapless experiment
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1885792/posts
Could she at least brush her teeth?
Yes I noticed last time I was in the “underground” the vast odors. No place like Britain if you like the effervescence of hormonal glandular smells.
At least 2 showers a day please if we’re gong to be in an elevator together...
or walk up the stairs...
Some funny comments to the article:
- “British hygiene is every bit the equal of British cooking and British dentistry.”
- “Thank god I married an American. You and yours can enjoy your smelly self.”
Why am I remined of the People in the Muck scene from Monty Python’s Holy Grail.....
I guess they have more in common with the French than I thought.
I am just a new boy,
Stranger in this town.
Where are all the good times?
Who’s gonna show this stranger around?
Ooooh, I need a dirty woman.
Ooooh, I need a dirty girl.
Will some cold woman in this desert land
Make me feel like a real man?
Take this rock and roll refugee
Oooh, baby set me free.
Ooooh, I need a dirty woman.
Ooooh, I need a dirty girl.
I’m half American and English so I have lots of battling DNA in me which one wouldn’t think being the case as we as Americans share a language and heritage with the Brits.
I can confirm that when visiting my English grandparents in the 1970s that they didn’t bathe as much as I was used to. For one thing, their toilet facility was on the back porch and their bath was a tub in the kitchen covered by a wooden board! To heat up water for a bath, you had to heat up water for a bath! There was no plumbing into it. And not just one person used that bath water. It wasn’t too pleasant to be the second person taking the bath. At the time of those visits at 6 and 10 years, I wasn’t so much concerned about the used bath water, but the luke-warmness of it.
My mom came to the U.S. when she was 21 so she lost some of her English ways along the way...infrequent bathing being one. I can remember her telling me when I was an adolescent that as a teen she washed her hair once a week! I was horrified! So I fluctuate between one to two showers/baths a day, but sometimes I revert to my primitive English heritage. It’s fun to go a little Neanderthal at times!
Another thing that was totally odd to me was that my grandparents had no refrigerator. They had a pantry. Milk and drinks were luke warm. No refrigeration so perishables had to be used up fast. As an American, I love my ice!
My mom did confirm that my grandfather finally joined the 20th century during the 1980s. She went back to visit and he had a tiny fridge with the tiniest ice cube tray. :)
One funny story was that my grandparents came to visit my mom and dad while my dad was still stationed in England. Grandma wasn’t overly concerned with aesthetics or hygiene to say the least, but she did try to be thoughtful in her own way. She had packed in her suitcase a dead chicken with the feathers still on it for the meal. :) Good ole g-ma. :) Glad I got to meet her that one time when I was 6. She had just passed before my 2nd visit. Rough and grumpy and a little bit lazy at times, but she and my grandfather got their family through WWII. She knew how to make do and survive.
We had a teacher who’s entire family didn’t use soap, for anything. They showered, but didn’t use soap. They washed their clothes, but didn’t use soap.
They, smelled, bad. Strongly, aromatically, shockingly, bad.
From the piece:
In the bedroom was a pitcher and a bowl and a towel, and soap. You stripped to the waist and washed your upper body, then put your shirt back on and stripped off (or lifted your underskirt) to wash your lower body. Voila! Simple, fast, easy, private, and clean. You could wash off at the wash basin several times a day if you wanted.
Me talking:
I'm reminded of Kelly McGillis playing the Amish woman Rachel bathing this way in the movie Witness.
Never mind the differences in the cultures....its good to shower every day.
Washing off the dead skin, feels great, wakes you up. Why would you deny yourself? I find the whole europe thing is always moving backwards...cleanliness for the primitive man was not an easy habit to get into.
Soap is cheap, and I really can’t stand myself if I don’t bathe daily. I love the smell of soap and clean linens, it is a simple pleasure. I do have a problem with the advertising industry making us paranoid in the service of selling $200 little jars of goo, but in addition to feeling as though my intelligence is being insulted by some 22 year old pushing wrinkle cream we also have the very basic fact that I’m frugal/cheap/of-Scottish-descent.
As a red-blooded hetero male, I find the scent of pheromone-rich female sweat to be intoxicating.
