A gaping hole in the tiled ground of my bathroom remained for nearly six months after I moved into my apartment in Hamilton about three years ago. There, a pipe was put in and a custom made stainless steel sink, in the approximate shape and size of a Payless shoebox, was eventually inserted. Because of its shape it never drained properly, leaving me to manually drive frothy globs of toothpaste and soap by flooding them toward the conduit.Although improved from the previous bathroom sink, I am again fighting off plaque half heartedly at my new home in Nottingham. In traditional British fashion, the basin receives waterfall from two sources – a cold tap on the right and a scalding hot tap on the left hand side. The cold tap is leaky, to boot.
With my hands cupped under the tap to my right until I am barely inducing a Raynaud’s attack, I brace myself to neutralize the temperature by transferring my palms to the stream of hot water that burns on my skin.
I have always been reluctant to use a proper cup in the bathroom, where germs are afloat and can accumulate beyond my naked eye. Besides this, I hate the idea of backwashing toothpaste foam into something I will reuse. It is simply a personal distaste. And I am unwilling to resort to paper which is a waste.
If anybody knows me well, I am rather ceremonial about my dental routine.
I would rather endure the burden on my hands in order to avoid further interrupting this ritual.
In a year or so, when I relocate a priority will be to test run the old Oral-B in each bathroom instead of finding in working order everything but the bathroom sink.
