Sunday, May 27, 2007

Seething about sunflowers

I'm beginning to wonder if there's anything on this bloody planet that doesn't make me angry. I found myself getting a bittie wound up just by random interweb browsing, so thought, 'OK Cattie, before your jaw settles into that clenched rictus from too much exposure to irritating twats, off you go and have a nice relaxing bath.' Mistake.

Firstly, I overfilled the bath a tad, due to becoming distracted for a few minutes by a yelling ginger tomcat, and only caught the rising water level just before the bathroom flooded. Somewhat agitated and annoyed at my own incompetence in bath-running, I sat on the pot for a while with my head in my hands trying to calm down. Then of course I had to postpone actually getting in the bath for what seemed an age, while letting some of the water run away to get to a manageable bathing depth. I soon realised that the plughole obviously needs some attention with a plunger, as I've seen six feet of snow disappear quicker than my bathwater.

Then there was another wee delay while I had the difficult decision of which product to use. In the end I plumped for one of those expensive fizzy things, full of stress-banishing essential oils, charmingly called 'Still Life'. This was unwise. I'm at a loss to comprehend why I purchased this particular ballistic in the first place. I normally avoid the ones which spew out bits of vegetation and turn your bath into an unappetising broth. (Still, they're better than the glittery varieties. Who needs green sparkles attaching themselves to one's pubic region and refusing to budge?) I can only surmise that I must've been particularly stressed when compiling my order and never noticed the words 'sunflower petals' in the description. More to beat myself up with: I'm normally so careful, what the feck is happening to me?!

Anyway, 'Still Life' went in and fizzed around happily, hurling out bits of dead flowers which, to my myopic eyes, looked suspiciously like dessicated spiders - aye, BIG dessicated spiders at that - and although off-putting, I gingerly entered. The good thing about the overfilling of the bath was that I could pick off the floating spidery flower heads without having to stretch too much. This was just a minor consolation though. I built a little sculpture of the detritus on a sponge. It looked like something you'd see at a city bus-stop on a Sunday morning.

I didn't stay long in the bath. What was the point? Even if you did manage to begin to feel the benefits of the relaxing oils, aromas and nice hot water, it would all evaporate immediately when you got out and were forced to spend the next half hour picking flowery bits out of the plughole, and madly Cif-ing the whole tub to get rid of the yellow and brown petals that stick to the sides of the tub. What's the bloody point? I can only assume that Lush customers are expected to have servants to clean up after themselves. This is probably not far from the truth, as the customer base (at least if the Lush forum is at all representative) seems to consist of 13 year old girls. Presumably their mums clean up all the petals and glitter they leave in their wake.

Sunflowers? Bah. I understand why Van Gogh cut his ear off.