“O! Water Hot is a noble thing!” as Tolkien wrote, and he wasn’t wrong. Water Hot in a bath is a fine thing, Water Hot pouring over tea leaves is an excellent thing, and Water Hot warming up your bed is more or less the pinnacle of human civilization.
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The Alongsider Wallet: A Thing of Beauty and a Joy Foraverylongtime
It is seldom that one gets a chance to make a purchase without a single scrap of buyer’s remorse. Is it useful? Yes. Is it beautiful? Yes. (William Morris sits back with a contented sigh.) Is it well-made, from quality materials? Yes. Is it environmentally friendly? Yes. Is it ethical? Yes.
As drawn as I am to the idea of simplicity, there are times when buying something is the sensible thing to do, and one of those times is when your wallet/purse starts literally falling to pieces. I wanted a replacement which was practical, hard-wearing, aesthetically pleasing, and ethical. Happily, it did not take me long to find.
I bought an Alongsider Wallet from the Loyal Workshop, a freedom business which provides an alternative form of employment for women in Kolkata who want to exit the sex trade. They are given a living wage, health care, education, legal and financial advice, counselling… the list goes on. They are also trained in the production of beautiful leather products (which are, for those of you who are worrying, tanned using the ecologically sensitive vegetable tanning process).
So not only do you get a high-quality product, you also get to support women leaving a hellish life for a life of dignity and independence. Win, win, win.
But to turn to the details of the wallet in question! (Much more beautiful photos than mine are available here.) It’s a largish wallet – definitely not back-pocket material – but contains so much you could even use it as a clutch purse/handbag.
There’s space for six or more cards, a pocket for coins which looks like it will spill them everywhere – but doesn’t, a thin pocket for notes, and a thicker pocket which could hold a smartphone, or a notebook and pencil, or a slim block of chocolate… the list goes on. All this, without being chunky.
The leather is beautifully smooth in the hands (and it smells amazing). With time and care, the leather will weather and gain the patina of age, but (unlike my old wallet) it won’t start falling apart. And this is why I chose so carefully: this wallet will be with me for a very long time.
For those of you who are all about the aesthetics, the Alongsider Wallet is available in brown and tan, and comes beautifully packaged. Once you get past the protective layers of packaging for transport, there is an elegant buttoned card envelope, which opens to reveal a sheet of black tissue wrapped around the wallet itself.
For those of you who are not interested in large wallets, the Loyal Workshop also make a smaller, pocket-able wallet, two kinds of satchel (larger and smaller) and two kinds of belt (men’s waists and women’s hips – I am hoping they will add one for women’s waists).
In short, I highly recommend this wallet, particularly for those who want to pair ethics and aesthetics in a product that will last for years and years.
The Surprising History of the Bath
The humble bath is so often overlooked. This useful piece of household equipment just sits there, mostly unused, sometimes even downgraded to a mere surface for shower run-off, and yet, the stories it could tell…
A good many people have entered this vale of tears via a bath, since the popularity of water births has increased. One assumes that a warm bath is less of a nasty shock for the new entrant, although presumably they need to be fished out fairly sharpish so they can start breathing in the normal way.
Even more people have departed this vale of tears in the bath. Even overlooking all those who were insufficiently careful with their electrical appliances while bathing.
As it says in Green Eggs and Hamlet,
“To sleep, to dream, now there’s the rub
I could drop a toaster in my tub.”
Winner of the gong for “Most Often Portrayed Dead in His Bath” is Jean-Paul Marat. Marat was assassinated in his tub, which should serve as a warning to all mankind about not giving audiences to young ladies while in the bath, especially when your wife warns you not to!
Agamemnon’s wife is said to have murdered him in the bath, although frankly, after sacrificing their daughter, staying away ten years, and then arriving home with his mistress and their children, he had it coming.
Three of the nine women who believed themselves to be married to George Joseph Smith – under a variety of different names – died in their baths shortly after making wills in his favour. The experienced diver who was helping the pathologist figure out howdunnit had a narrow escape too – it took the pathologist and a doctor half an hour to bring her round.
That’s births and deaths, what about marriages? I thought things probably hadn’t got that far (except perhaps in California) until I saw this. Which, now I look into it, appears to be from California. Where anything can and probably does happen.
The bath is also a great place for thinking. Archimedes figured out the whole water-displacement-volume thing in his tub time, and then invented a scientific method of stealing someone else’s bathwater: the Archimedes’ Screw. Centuries later, the great Agatha Christie dreamt up plots while lying in the bath and munching apples.
I myself am entirely pro-bath. I have lived in bath-having houses for the last twelve years, and while I have nothing against showers, there is nothing so luxuriously comforting as a hot bath when you come home soaked through on a cold rainy day.
This probably seems all the more luxurious to me as bathtubs did not feature largely in my childhood. When I was very little, we lived in a place where clean water was a rare and treasured thing.
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We had a little bowl of water to soap up with, and another little bowl to rinse off. Admittedly, I had less surface area back then, but it is actually possible to get clean that way, and it is definitely water-efficient.
Fast-forward a few years and it was bucket showers, with the hot water heated in an enormous black kettle over an open fire. Baths were sometimes had in a large pink plastic bowl, with each member of the family using the bathwater in turn (while Dad read The Lord of the Rings outside the bathroom door). Proper old-school, that was.
I do try to be eco-friendly, which is why I have not made maximal use of the baths available to me for the last decade or so. But I recently realized that two showers take about as much water as one bath. (Seriously, try putting the plug in next time you shower. You will be surprised. Especially if you only have a shower stall…)
And then I made my great discovery. Using the water-displacement theories of that great bather of antiquity, Archimedes, one can enjoy a deeper bath without using more water. How, you ask? Add mass, ideally in the form of one’s dearly beloved. The volume of water thus displaced is experienced as greater depth.
Eureka.