It is of bathroom sinks that I wish to write. It is not a subject that previously engaged me but two weeks in different hotels, restaurants and conference centres has brought this to the top of my agenda. In these momentous times it may seem an eccentric subject, but I think it is no exaggeration to say the handbasin crisis, which I have decided exists, captures the plight of western society.
The bathroom sink has endured for decades in largely perfect form. It may not be pretty but the essentials were clear: it had to be deep enough to be filled. It needed a sufficient slope for the water to drain so it wasn’t left festooned with expectorated toothpaste or shaved facial hair. It could be rounded or rectangular, large or small. There was room for variety in the taps but there was no benefit to fiddling with the core principles.
Now and then you’d come across some trendy place with a basin shaped like a frisbee and made of recycled machine-gun parts but, mostly, function ruled. So it was a shock to check in to my hotel and discover an interesting tea-tray-shaped basin in the bathroom, shallow, lacking any slope and ergonomically calibrated to splatter my shirt with water.
This was not, I should stress, one of those high-end boutique hotels where you pay good money for impractical design. This was a Novotel, albeit one with a couple of style conceits in the lobby that hinted at the bear traps that always await the unwary traveller when a corporate hotel decides to show its personality.
Hotels, of course, are specialists in finding little ways to disorientate you: switches that correspond to all but one of the bedroom lights, showers that suddenly plunge or soar in temperature, and who can forget the temperamental magnetic door keys that stop working on contact with mobile phones, credit cards, clothes, people, matter and anti-matter?
The malformed basin, though, is a new circle of hell, especially for those prone to middle-class guilt. It was only on the second morning, when I found the remains of the previous night’s tooth-cleaning still in the sink, that I became fixated with not leaving a mess for the room cleaner.
That meant pouring a glass of water into the flat sink from the requisite height to generate momentum, but at sufficient distance to avoid covering my suit in the morning’s toothpaste. The optimal path involved sneaking up on the basin from the side and hurling the contents of the glass while dashing back out of the door. The next trick was to mop up all the water which missed the basin, so as not to leave that for the cleaner either.
So why, to return to my assertion at the top of this article, is my bad basin experience a symptom of the malaise of western society? Because this divorce of form from function speaks to an uber-metropolitan wastrel tendency so intellectually idle that it stands ready to gasp in appreciation of non-functional bathroom fittings.
It is frankly a matter of the purest luck that Vladimir Putin has never checked into a Novotel or he would not just have invaded Ukraine but would be so emboldened that he’d be well on his way to the French Riviera. No wonder dictators and strongmen the world over think democracy is doomed when our intellectual decline plumbs such depths that even nondescript corporate hotels seek to delight patrons with fittings that don’t work but look interesting.
It is when the admirable quest to build a better mousetrap is lost in the goal of building a prettier one. Duchamp may have mesmerised the art world with an upside-down urinal, but no one wants to pee in one. Yet one day soon I will, no doubt, check into a business hotel and find they are standard in all bathrooms.
There are so many ways life, and even hotels, can be improved. Why waste effort on the things that already work? Frankly, for the future safety of democracy, it is time to draw a line on the purveyors of this aesthetic and moral lassitude. We must fight them in bathrooms, in the toilets, in the restaurants, hotels and exhibition centres.
It is time to defy that sinking feeling and reclaim the high ground, one basin at a time.
Follow Robert on Twitter @robertshrimsley and email him at [email protected]
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