Winter 4 June, 2007

COLD Days
Part TWO:

The second part of a rant about my intolerance for winter...

I was soaking in the bath the other night imagining what it must have been like, before the advent of central heating or especially heated plumbing. Imagine having to boil water over an open fire to take a bath. And how many teapots would one have to boil to fill a tub this size? The previous pot full would be cold before the next was hot enough to be added. I’ll bet I’d be a hell of a lot dirtier than I am these days.

Imagine that…It wasn’t that long ago either. Honestly, Mauzi and I went through more than one inner-city Melbourne house that still had an outhouse as the only toilet and one poor little old lady had to walk out the kitchen door, down a flight of rickety wooden stairs and under the back of the house into what used to be a coal cellar to take a bath. Nothing down there but a bare tub, a couple of rusty pipes snaking down from the kitchen above and a ratty old towel on the dirt floor. Gives new meaning to the term “fixer-upper”.

We bolted from that property. No kidding, the agents chased us down the street ringing the auction bell after us!

But who am I to complain really. Matt, my mate in Japan, moved from metropolis Tokyo to the mountain town of Niigata on the west coast of Japan to teach at the local university. They set him up with a place near campus. In winter, in this house, wherever Matt goes, the space heater follows him like a loyal dog and ice forms in the rooms they leave behind. Yes, ice! Dishes freeze in the sink, spoons in teacups and towels turn cold and hard as plaster if left to hang in an unheated space.

You’d never imagine that in a country so technologically advanced, so on the cusp of the future that is modern Japan…You would never imagine that people have to live in such rudimentary and archaic conditions. Here is a country whose toilets talk, warm to your body temperature and mask your anal utterances with the pleasant sounds of waterfalls and the music of Yanni! Here is a country that throwing cash bribes at small island nations to persuade them to vote to kill humpback whales for “research” (school lunches) that no one in Japan wants to eat anymore anyway. Hey Korizumi, it’s the twenty-first century man! The people don’t want blubber, they want insulation!!!

So I guess I don’t have it that bad after all. No frozen sinks, no ice storms and no “snow-days”. Come to think of it, I sure do miss those snow-days. Maybe we can have a “frost-day”. Doubtful…