A daily shower is money down the drain

When did it become an inalienable human right to have a shower every day? I ask the question because pretty clearly it wasn’t always so. Yes, the Romans had showers – of course they did (they probably had the internet, too, but archaeologists can’t see it). A potter about online will tell you that we got the first mechanical shower here (hand pumped) thanks to the ingenuity of a plumber from Ludgate Hill named William Feetham. That was in 1767, which means that by the time Jane Austen was getting ink on her fingers a shower was an option for some.

So the answer to my question is somewhere between 1767, when I expect a monthly bath was de rigueur for most of us, and around 1990, by which point it become common for Britons to take a daily shower and regard it as essential. We can probably pinpoint the shower’s emergence as a daily fact of life between the tearing of the shower curtain in Psycho in 1960 and Michael Douglas’s impressive displays of shower-related stamina with Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct in 1992. Indeed, according to a poll by YouGov from 2018, 62 per cent of Britons take at least one shower each day – indicating, perhaps, that there are those who routinely take more than one. These showers last, on average, seven to eight minutes.

And that, whichever way you cut it, must be using an eyewatering amount of water. How much? Well, a few years back the Energy Saving Trust released some figures stating that Britain used 2.2 billion litres of water a day showering – which is about as much water as pours over the Niagara Falls in ten minutes (at around 750,000 US gallons per second, if you’re interested). That’s a lot of water. 

As well as being cleaned and treated at great expense by your local French-owned water company, this water probably has had to be heated by you, too. All of which means that there’s a massive carbon and environmental impact from your daily shower – not to mention a major financial cumulative cost, especially when you consider that something like a fifth of all energy used at home is to heat water. And if you like longer showers, well good luck to you. A power shower is bringing the cost-of-living crisis your way quicker than you can say Imperial Leather.

So here’s a thought. Why don’t we simply shower every other day? Firstly, it gives you eight valuable minutes back – and that’s not to be sniffed at. Over a year eight minutes every other day stacks up to 1,460 minutes, which tots up to a full 24 hours — so you could get a whole day of your life back. Wowsers. 

Secondly, think of the cut in carbon emissions – all without splurging tens of thousands and committing an egregious act of virtue-signalling by buying a Tesla or some grotesque hybrid 4×4 that weighs more than a bank vault because it’s lugging around two mutually inefficient propulsions systems.

I admit that going shower-commando sounds a bit old school, but don’t forget that not so long ago men and women might bathe just once a week (and some quite probably less frequently than that) – back in the 1950s and 1960s, that is. Things moved on for adults once we all started getting proper plumbing but it was still common for children to bathe once a week in the 1970s and 1980s. Angela Rayner says she used to have weekly bath at her grandparents’ house (because her parents were so poor, she has said) and it’s not held her back – her politics might stink, but she doesn’t, or at least not to my knowledge.

And is all this showering even necessary? Almost certainly not, particularly when you consider how sedentary we are now. Most of us hardly break a sweat on a daily basis in the first place: the only muscles that increasingly lardy Britons stress are jaw muscles, or perhaps an arm used to raise a takeaway pizza to the lips. (And frankly if you break a sweat chewing, you need a cardiologist, not a shower.) Of course, one can’t deny the effects of anxiety – watching England progress through the World Cup is apt to make even the most honed among us perspire. But how stressed do you have to get to need a shower?

As well as saving gas or electricity (so helping the planet, and all those poor island countries that will otherwise sink into the Pacific) and avoiding otherwise spiralling costs, you’ll also have the pleasure of being part of a movement that is saving enough water over the course of a year to fill a reservoir – and I don’t know if you’ve seen a reservoir recently but they could do with all the water they can get. Halving our annual shower ration will help keep reservoirs topped up without having to kiss goodbye to the Wimbledon fortnight or the cricket season. 

All we have to do is drop our relatively recently adopted daily fixation with a shower and reacquaint ourselves with a thing called a flannel. I know, how positively Tudor, but it’s even reusable. (So it’s doubly green, and not just after a few months’ use.) In extreme cases you could consider using strong cologne if you need to. But for most of us that wouldn’t be necessary because we are essentially no-sweat persons. We make coral look athletic. The fact is that for the majority there’s simply no earthly reason we should wantonly drench our perfectly clean bodies in gallons of water simply because people in Dallas did 40 years ago and Britons caught the notion.

So come on folks, it’s time to follow Bobby Ewing and step out of the shower. We need to break this pointless and wasteful aqueous obsession. Get a flannel and a bar of soap. Get Victorian. Think of the money. That, my friends, is what the sweet smell of success is all about.