Monday 4th April 2011
Bruce MacBain, my personal architect, insisted on Majestic – unsurpassed for shower screens and cleanth (that’s cleanness) of design. No clumsy, lumpy metal column to secure it to the wall, just two gracious but assertive hinges.
So I forked £475.
The seal around the screen is a simple length of plastic that slides onto the glass. But part of it is hollow. Water gets in and, then… mould!
Bruce MacBain, what have you done! And Majestic! I bet the design team are ‘boys’ who’ve got dollies or wives wiping and rinsing.
Little point in gleaming miraculous hinges if you’ve got a fringe of black slime.
Now you may remember Andy Warhol’s friend, A, who cleaned, naked to reduce dust-generation, each letter of her type-writer with a fresh Q-tip. I keep Q-tips for applying bleach to stubborn stains but in a rage of inspiration I began to push one through the hollow plastic with a piece of wire. Difficult and delicate. One false move and there could have been a rupture. I’m sure Roland Mainflower, Ed Jasper’s heart doctor partner, must feel the same when pushing wires into people’s hearts to further life. Slowly, slowly, with only one heart-stopping moment when it looked as if a Q-tip would be stuck in my shower-screen seal for good, it passed through … and cleansed! All black sludge gathered and removed.
Q-tip with Cleansed Shower-Screen Seal
Bruce MacBain-inspired Majestic Shower Screen. PLEASE NOTE the Upright Chrome Strip you see on the Left is the Edging for the Tiles. It is Not Part of the Screen
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“PLEASE NOTE the Upright Chrome Strip you see on the Left is the Edging for the Tiles. It is Not Part of the Screen”
If this has to be pointed out, surely it rather takes away from the intended column-free, hinge-only effect of your expensive arrangement?
I recall the good old days when even a roof to the bathroom was optional.
Still, lovely Q-Tipping.
All right! I’ll have the bathroom pulled down just to please you! And re-built!
Will the home ever be good enough!
I’ve come a long way from the roofless Portobello Road bathroom which, even worse, was AVOCADO and never re-done; according to Frankie-Doreen Gunn, stank of damp AND, had a crude plank over the lav cistern, after the smashing of the avo lid during the re-roofing operation.
But not far enough!
In those days I seemed not to notice. Val and I were forever in the drawing room of that flat, swagging and gilding everything in sight.
Had I removed the bath, I would have been able to show, in the graph, the sublime ‘floating’ aspect of the Bruce MacBain-inspired shower screen. I suppose I should have shown more commitment.
The Portobello Road bathroom – my first experience of British bathing custom. I never ceased to be surprised by the extravagant wall to wall carpet.
That was another of its faults! Foam-backed carpet from ALLIED. Nevertheless – rag-rolled walls, rolled by Robert Nevil and myself and later a Jean-Paul Phillippe Egyptian frieze.
We were not wretched