Ian McMillan: Soap drama of the wash-times that went away

I reckon it dates back to the days before bathrooms and the universal use of the tin bath in front of the fire, and if you didn’t want to go to the faff of getting the tin bath out you’d have the aforementioned Reyt Good Wesh.

The RGW has rules as tight as those for chess or caber tossing. The shirt comes off (this is an exclusively male ritual, as far as I know) and is hung on the back of a chair.

Sometimes, oddly, the vest stays on. The hands, well soaped-up, are plunged into the red hot water in the sink; if the glasses haven’t been discarded, they will now steam up like the windows of a chip shop in a cold snap. The arms are soaped, and the vest somehow stays dry. The armpits are soaped. The neck is soaped.

Then comes the crowning glory, the equivalent of the drum solo or the chef whipping off the cover on the plate to reveal the delights beneath: the rubbing of the face with the hands while going BrfBrfBrfBrffffff as water and suds spray everywhere though somehow they steer clear of the vest.

I may not have captured the sound correctly and there may be regional variations but you know the kind of thing I mean. That sound was the sound of pride, of men who worked in mucky, filthy industries making sure they were clean to eat their tea or go out to the club for a few pints.

And now, sadly, I think that men aren’t that good at keeping themselves clean any more. A cultural tipping point always occurs when things that were once acceptable aren’t acceptable any more and society carries on the long march to the sunlit uplands. People aren’t openly racist in a way that they once were, and homophobia seems to be on the wane, ever so slightly. We’re still a long way from the end of sexism and ageism, sadly, and it still seems to be acceptable in some quarters to take the rise out of disabled people. The tipping point will come one day, of course. I have a dream.

But the “ism” that’s rife all over the place is Cleanism; there seems to be an active dislike in certain sections of the male population to, and I can’t think of a delicate way of putting this in a family newspaper, washing their hands after they’ve been to the toilet.

I realise that the use of the word Toilet might be a bit much if you’re having your breakfast so for the rest of this column I’ll replace it with the neutral word Balaclava. I was going to use the word Surrey but I know there would have been complaints so Balaclava it is.

I was in a public Balaclava on a station recently and a train had just come in so the Balaclava was full of blokes making themselves comfortable, as the euphemism goes. It was partly the problem that there was only one sink but I was amazed to note how many blokes just zipped and ran.

Perhaps they were scuttling for a train but I doubt it. Some were, horrifically, on their way to the burger bar. The man in front of me at the sink was an elderly gent in the kind of leisurewear that elderly gents sport when they’re going on a weekend break, and he was washing his hands as carefully as a veteran of the RGW would.

The hands were scrubbed. The fingers were cleaned. He even had a go at his fingernails. If he could have, he would have taken his shirt off and rubbed his hands over his face and gone BrfBrfBrfffff. The lad behind me, who wanted to wash his hands, was getting impatient, tutting and sighing until he left the Balaclava without a wash. More sinks, please, policy-makers.

Now, as a timid kind of chap, it’s hard to know what to do in these situations. If I was bigger and stronger and less afraid of confrontation I would simply chase after the non-washers and say “Hey, stupid, have you never heard of public health?” and I’d march them back to the taps.

Of course, that’s never going to happen; I’m too much of a scaredy-cat. I’ve tried it once or twice in the past with those dog-owners who don’t clean up after their animals and I’ve just got abuse or gormlessness in return.

Signs don’t seem to help. Adverts on telly could be a start. Celebrities could be filmed washing their hands and drying them but surely in the early decades of the 21st century we don’t have to remind blokes to wash their hands after going to the Balaclava, do we?

Answers on a postcard, please. A clean one.