The joy of tuning in to the night

‘That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency,’ wrote George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it.’

Her thought extends beyond ‘compassion fatigue’ in the face of global suffering on a scale beyond our homely ken, but to life itself in its unfathomable abundance: the dramas, the joys and the sorrows and the sheer activity that surrounds us and would engulf us if we paused for long enough to think about everything. We screen almost all of it out. We have to.

Our Derbyshire home is on a hillside in the middle of fields and woods. I have sunk an ordinary bath into the earth near the outdoor coal shed: the kind of cast-iron thing that farmers turn into makeshift drinking troughs for cattle. For £5 I bought one, pristine save for slight discolouration of the enamel, still complete with taps and plug. Plumbed into our domestic hot and cold water pipes, it made for a perfect al fresco bath, the waste water piped down into a little wood. I’ve insulated the sides and underside, and the bubbles from a dash of Radox create an effective layer of insulation on the warm water’s surface. Our secret bath is hidden from the drive and the house windows, and you can lie there at sunset, at dawn, or under the stars, and fall into a long and deep meditation. I did so around midnight on Saturday, a glass of red wine by the soap dish. It was almost 1 a.m. before I slipped back into my dressing gown, and to bed. In the wind you don’t need a towel: just stand, steaming, for less than a minute, and you’re dry.