I need a bath...

A love letter to the long soak

Feb 22, 2026

Still from *Elizabethtown* (2005), Paramount Pictures.

For the first time in my life, I’m living in a home without a bath. And I am bereft.

If you’re a shower person, you will struggle to comprehend this post. Just as I struggle to empathise with your preference for standing in a glass box being sprayed with water rather than languishing, laid down, in it up to your chin.

“You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” doesn’t apply here — because I absolutely did know prior to being without one that my love for a hot bath runs as deep as…yes…a hot bath.

With water as close to the brim as physics will allow, and as hot as my skin can take, baths have seen me through the best and worst of times.

As Sylvia Plath famously wrote, “There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.”

I’ve lain in baths morose and directionless, at times when standing upright in the shower felt an impossible task for weary bones. When there’s been nothing indulgent to pour in, and the stark, steaming water and sudden silence of a turned-off tap leaves nowhere to hide.

Then there’s a bath of an altogether different kind: the getting-ready bath. Glass of something cold and crisp on the side, reached for through a mountain of bubbles saved for very-best. But this one comes with tasks: facemask, razor and body scrub at the ready. Party playlist on shuffle. It’s a lot of prep for a night that most often ended in smudged mascara and blistered feet.

The best baths are somewhere in between. A need to retreat, zero time pressure and enough hot water to top it up as it cools. Nothing too worrisome to contemplate, but perhaps a decision to make which tends to quietly reach clarity around the 30-minute mark without you realising.

My most memorable baths certainly weren’t the most enjoyable…Like the one when I didn’t know I was pregnant and my body told me to GET OUT despite my confusion at feeling faint and panicked in the hot water instead of my usual state of bliss.

Or the ill-judged one late in that same pregnancy when I simply couldn’t manoeuvre my body out again and had to call for my partner to haul me up like some kind of beached sea mammal rescue mission.

Ironically, I thought my love of baths would see me through a beautiful, empowering water birth, but hours of bobbing about in the tepid pool at my local midwife unit led only to being whisked away for a C-section.

One of my favourite baths was in my and my partner’s first shared flat. The tenement bathroom was tiny and quirky. Someone before had created a little step and raised platform round the bath so it appeared sunken. The window, though normal sized therefore ran from ceiling to floor, stopping level with the bath. I’d crack it open and let the cold air and sounds of the city slip through.

One evening, in this particular bath, I had an Amy Winehouse album playing. She’d not long died, and I felt a sadness I’d never experienced from a ‘celebrity’ death before. Suddenly there was the oddest shift in the room and it felt and sounded exactly like she was right there singing beside me, as if her voice had detached from the track. Now. Am I saying the ghost of a worldwide icon and legend opted to visit me, of all people, from the grave? Absolutely. Or perhaps I’d just entered a meditative state and everything went a bit trippy. Either way, the power of the bath to connect me to something deeper has always been there.

It sometimes feels baths are becoming an endangered species. Hotels and self-catering accommodation have begun to lack them more often than possess them. For a hotel especially, with its endless supply of scalding hot water, it’s criminal to instead have a shower with a water pressure which alternates between dribble and trickle. And now that I don’t have a bath at home, the rare chance I have to go away simply must feature one. I’ll spend hours trying to decipher if the bog standard room has one, or if they’re solely reserved for the out-of-budget suite. Baths in bedrooms, as is sometimes the case, is also a no-no for me. I want a bolted door and a visually-impairing haze of steam around me.

My current lack is not for want of trying. I’ve now been ghosted by two plumbers who nodded along with my plans to simply replace our existing shower cubicle with a shower-over-bath, and not do a huge reno of the whole room. One eventually got back and said he was too busy, but I fear they are both after full-scale jobs to make it worth their while. Or I’m just really annoying, which was my other hypothesis. Maybe they could smell my desperation.

Because to me, a bath isn’t just self-care; a phrase I’m becoming sick of reading and hearing, which has become another capitalist coup to sell us stuff we don’t need. To me, they’re more. Aside from the obvious hygiene stuff, baths are about ritual and reflection. It’s about health too. I swear the back-to-back viruses I’ve battled this winter would have been shorter and sweeter if I’d had access to a scorching, tea-tree infused bath.

I even came across some actual evidence to back this all up: A 2025 University of Oregon study found that hot water immersion is more effective than traditional or infrared saunas for boosting cardiovascular and immune health. Hot tubs/baths raise core body temperature higher and faster, providing a stronger physiological response and reducing blood pressure more than 3x as much as saunas.

So there.

How I miss buying decadently scented things to pour in a bath. I tried those shower steamer things but nothing comes close. The beauty of the bath is that it doesn’t need to be anything expensive, as long as it smells good and bubbles, it will more than suffice. I used to love this one, which costs a mere £1.79. Simply decant into amber pump bottles for more aesthetically pleasing shelf presence.

I’ve spent the l-o-n-g winter months dossing about in my navy fleece dressing gown, often with the hood up, like some kind of grim reaper. Now sick of the sight of myself, I’m determined to replace it with something chicer. I’m envisioning some kind of printed, velvet kimono like the below from Never Fully Dressed. It’s even reversible….