My parents have spent a good deal of their adult lives looking after lodgers and foreign students, so that they now generally remember a student by whether they hung the towels properly or if they had too much milk on their cereal at breakfast. In some ways they've rewritten Dr Martin Luther King. Whereas he believed in judging people based, "not on the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character", my folks couldn’t care less for colour or character, as long as they spend less than 10 minutes in the shower and remember to give the bathtub a going over with the shower nozzle, then you’re all right by their standards and are more than welcome to rent a room and indulge in a spot of light genocide. As far as the delineation of what is good and evil by moral standards goes, my house is a brave new world of gas-bill related divine wrath.
What they fail to realise is that whilst someone like Jesus would probably end up cluttering up the bathroom with different brands of conditioner, clogging up the sink with prostitute hair and leaving miraculous but unsightly wine stains around the bath tub, this doesn’t make him a worse individual than say, Mussolini, who would probably be a slightly more considerate lodger – only needing a dab of polish for the jackboots and a shammy to give the bald spot a good buffing of a Tuesday.
But logical protests fall on deaf ears. For, in their mind, hot water consumption is intrinsically linked to moral fibre. If you start the day with a 5-10 minute shower, you’ll go off and lead a productive, wholesome and fulfilling day.
If you’re there for between 10-12 minutes, watch out ethnic Kurds!
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