Bubble trouble

IT MIGHT be useful, I think, if I got some of those glasses in that advertisement that shows people wearing them in the shower.

For, though I reckon they would need the addition of some little windscreen wipers to be really effective, it might spare me a repeat of the robust reproof I got the other night from Mrs Leaver for having John Frieda in my bath.

He is, I am told, the top people's hairdresser husband of Lulu, the songstress. But I hasten to explain, in order to dispel any images of impropriety now forming in your mind, that he is also a brand of shampoo and bodifier (whatever that may be) and comes with a "photo-session" formulation - coming in a fancy blue bottle at the sort of price a red-blooded bloke could have a good night out at the pub on and would, given a value-for-money choice between the two.

However, what John Frieda also is, I was sharply informed, is a commodity not for my use. He is too good and expensive to waste on the likes of me. No, I must restrict myself to the economy-class Tesco stuff.

Furthermore, I must not pour half a bottle of Mr Frieda into the tub, believing him to be not a liquidised unguent for the tresses, but a relaxing, aches and pains-relieving bubble-bath extract of herbs and essential oils.

Mr Frieda is not for working wonders on the bonce - though not mine - and not the back. And if I would only look, I'd see where the Radox is.

But this is the trouble about bathtime if you need specs to see. To begin with, they mist up.

And, anyway, when that problem evaporates, you still have to take them off when it comes to soaping or rinsing your noggin.

Thus, in the fogged vision of one cursed with long-sightedness, the vast, bewildering and ever-changing collection of toiletries that Mrs Leaver has arrayed within reach around in the tub is transformed into a blurred and multi-coloured panoply of mysterious allsorts. How folk got by in the old days with just a loofah and chunk of carbolic in the bathroom, I cannot imagine.

And it's no use screwing the tops of this stuff and sniffing it for a clue to its nature since every pleasant pong in the outpourings of the synthetic aroma industry can be found nowadays in the substances used in the bathroom - so that, with only a smell test, it would be impossible to distinguish, say, a shower gel reeking of thyme and pomegranate (don't ask me how this herbs and fruit salad lark got started) from a loo cleanser.

So it is, then, that during my half-blind ablutions, not only has the proscribed John Frieda been poured wastefully into the bathwater, but conditioner, moisturiser, talcum powder - and, yes, even shampoo - have been sloshed and shaken upon my head.

Once, when Mrs Leaver was given a selection of powerful essences - so eye-wateringly strong that you were recommended to add no more than three drops of any of them to the bathwater - I liberally sprinkled in a load of some stuff I thought was bath oil, but which, as I found out in my subsequent bespectacled enlightenment, was an elixir that, according to aromatherapy bunkum, was supposed to enhance the libido. It didn't, but it took days for the pungent and exotic joss-stick odour to wear off. But apart from this, no serious harm has befallen me.

Still, I could do without this lottery at bathtime - if only to avoid the ticking off for the misuse and waste of the best stuff that Mrs Leaver says is for her exclusive benefit.

Why don't the manufacturers put embossed lettering on their bottles so we are never in the dark?

Then, I could use not just the right things, but easily avoid the verboten dear designer stuff. And I would, you know.

For, apropos of this very topic, I can, thanks to the homespun wisdom of my dear old Mum on the purported merits of something that costs more because of the name on it, testify that you cannot always be sure it's the best - as, years ago, in the era when a lady might easily have got a wash and set at the hairdressers for thirty shillings of the old coin, she told me of the teenage daughter of an acquaintance who, for a special occasion, took herself off from these parts to Manchester for a hairdo in the salon of the international crimper Mr Vidal Sassoon and paid £11 pounds for it.

"E-e-e-leven pounds!" said Mum deprecatingly. "Yes, eleven pounds! And, you know, they say he's never there."

Even without specs, I can still see straight away what she meant.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.