Soap

Is there any invention as ancient and as fundamental as soap? Traced to Babylonian civilisation around 2,800 bc (handy for scrubbing down after all that gardening), it almost certainly goes back millennia further than that. It is mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah and by 1550 bc the Egyptians were marketing it as a medicinal aid for sores and other skin ailments. There was a soap factory buried in Pompeii — although the product is believed to have been used more for washing clothes because visitors to Roman bath houses preferred to scrub themselves with olive oil.

By 1192 soap had become one of Britain’s earliest mass-manufactured goods — though not one which pleased Richard of Devizes, who complained bitterly about the number of soap-makers, and the foul smell emanating from them, on a visit to Bristol. In China, soap had appeared by at least the 7th century. No wonder, when Unilever was looking for a slogan, it came up with the words: ‘Soap is civilisation.’

But try telling that to the young assistants in Tesco. It had never occurred to me that we could have an entirely soap-free civilisation until the other week when I decided that I needed to stock the bathroom cupboard. I walked up and down a couple of likely aisles, but there was no sign of the stuff. Unusually, for I have been known to wander for half an hour looking for things in supermarkets before I finally accept I need help, I stopped a young lad in a Tesco uniform and asked.