27. Too tall to shower
How it feels when you just don't fit.
Dear Reader,
With apologies for the disproportionate whinge for what is essentially a trivial, first-world problem I present the following campsite shower question for your consideration:
‘Why are you not high enough?’
I’ve written before about being tall for a girl (read ‘Size matters: Tall girl, misgendered’ here). I’ve had some laughs about my above-average stature over the years, but the inconvenience of being tall reached an unexpected height sorry on my recent campervan trip to a succession of eight campsites.
I didn’t even think about any issues the first morning: the fixed shower head in my cubicle within the ladies’ end of the shower block was mounted at the perfect height for hair washing and rinsing. So far, so good, but this shower would be a hard act to follow.
Day two’s shower was mounted high enough to accommodate me, but due to its non-adjustable head not sticking far enough out from the wall it was impossible for me to wash my hair or even my face while standing normally beneath it. Pressing myself against the freezing cold wall tiles was an effort disproportionate to how not very wet I got. No fun at all.
Shown the picture above taken on my slightly-damp phone when I got back to the van – eliciting the horrified response of ‘Why on EARTH are you taking pictures of yourself in the SHOWER, Rebecca?’ – my husband had no clue that I would even have had a problem. In the gents’ washroom, he told me, where the shower heads were attached to flexible hoses, he and his 6ft 5in frame had had no issues at all. ‘But how high was the mount?’ I hissed. ‘Dunno. It didn’t matter.’ Having convinced myself that the men just always have it all, I sulked until I’d finished my second cup of tea.
Over the trip I became used to the inconsistency: three showers were the perfect height, three required a certain amount of gymnastic prowess to enable me to wash my hair, and two we didn’t use at all.
We didn’t use the single shower at a tiny, independent site where we were required to stuff a pound coin into a slot for every two minutes of water we wanted. We weren’t refusing on principle – although to be honest I do expect a campsite’s fees to include such luxuries as hot showers – we just didn’t have any pound coins.
(We’ll be putting some in the glove compartment before our next trip.)
Our second-to-last campsite – I’m grateful that we pitched up on a much better one than this for our last night, otherwise my vanlife career would be OVER – offered idiosyncratic (let’s be nice, here) facilities. Its potwash (a badly-laminated, sodden sign identified it as such) was a single, free-standing sink, sans plumbing, which had been abandoned on a grassy slope outside the so-grubby-it-was-rotting ‘washroom’. A hopeful bucket had been positioned beneath the plughole for which, I’m sorry to say, there wasn’t even a plug.
Taps, yes, but no water, no plug, no hope. No, I’ll be kind: one thing would have suited me had the sink actually been usable was that it was at least a left-hand drainer. Having to boil a kettle to do so we did our washing up in our cosy van, appreciating even more with hindsight the heated, tiled room of stainless steel sinks with hot and cold running water and complimentary Fairy Liquid we’d used just that morning at our previous site.
The waste water disposal point – and I apologise for sharing this – was a filthy loo behind a low fence. This was apparently useable for its advertised purpose – I saw a fellow camper not enjoying emptying his Elsan toilet cassette down there – and at least it flushed. He then had to go all the way over to the washroom to wash his hands, emerging pale a little while later.
Reader, we didn’t dare enter the washroom that night, let alone plan to shower in it the next morning. Wouldn’t it be funny no, not really if the shower at that campsite had turned out to be the tallest of the bunch? I’m happy not to have dared, not even in the name of research.
Next day we felt we were in the lap of luxury: for our last night we’d booked a club site. We’re members of the two largest camping clubs1 in the UK, and with club sites we know what we’re going to get: they’re kitted out with well-maintained, modern facilities, and these are pretty consistent across the board. But this is where I was reminded of that other problem.
Reader, it’s not just the showers. If you’re of average height – or even just a little smaller in stature than I am – you’re perhaps likely not to have noticed the placement of washroom mirrors. I don’t need a mirror if I’m just washing my hands, but what if I’m using of those little cubicles with a mirror, a light, a plug socket and a washbasin?
Now, I do like to be clean, tidy and fairly presentable in a rustic kind of fashion, but in the last twenty years I’ve never really ‘done’ my hair, nor even worn make-up except when I felt I had to like at my own wedding. So, obviously I don’t need a mirror for those sorts of things, but I certainly want to see what I’m doing when I’m cleaning and flossing my teeth.
A too-low basin mirror is okay for that job, I suppose: bending to brush and floss is only a mild inconvenience. But then I imagined an alternative Rebecca – a better-presented one – having to lean forwards over the basin in order to view herself in the mirror while wielding heated tongs, hairspray, eyeliner and maybe even a fancy powder compact with precious little hope of them hitting their expectant target features. That would be a whole other pantomime story in this cubicle:
Cards on the table: of course, it’s sometimes an advantage to be tall. For instance, I needed every one of my 72 and a quarter inches on the Saturdays when I would do my Christmas shopping in London’s Oxford Street, before the convenience of online orders rendered that annual scrum blissfully unnecessary. Those crowded shopping trips would see me standing sometimes a whole head above other shoppers, and I would feel claustrophobic on their behalf, sorry that they surely had no hope of finding their way in the surging sea of bodies.
Reader, that’s one thing, but not having my height accommodated for such a basic function as showering irritates me probably more than it should. Heck, I feel excluded. People who aren’t as tall as I am would surely be able to shower just as well with a shower head mounted high enough to accommodate me as with one mounted further down, wouldn’t they? So come on, campsites. Please?
Love,
Rebecca
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I’m 5’3”, so when I rented my very first apartment I hadn’t really thought of shower height. The first time my partner (6’2”) came to visit, he spent several minutes explaining to me why my bathroom was terrible (the shower was too low for him). But he recently moved to a new apartment and it seems to be built for tall people - I’m dangerously too short to use the bathroom mirror! A nightmare.
You reminded me I haven’t been camping since pre-pandemic and I long to go, definitely already planning for next summer.
Great article, Rebecca and I feel your pain. I am fairly short so sometimes have the opposite problem with mirrors having to stand on tip-toe but all good in showers!