Steve Canavan: Power shower is a damp squid but mustn’t grumble

A quick disclaimer. This entire column is about a shower (yes, you read that correctly), so if you’ve anything remotely better to be doing with your time - tending the garden, grouting the tiles, putting your CD collection into alphabetical order - I suggest you go do that instead.

For those few still with us, I will proceed.

As you may recall if you were unlucky enough to read last week’s diatribe, I am on holiday in Northumberland.

We are staying in a lovely little cottage, at which we arrived following a lengthy and slightly arduous drive (my three-year-old Mary enquired ‘are we there yet?’ around half-a-mile into the journey and asked the same question approximately 927 times during the course of the following five hours. The only single pleasant period of the journey came after we stopped at Tebay services and purchased a tub of sausages which shut her up for 20 wonderful minutes).

Anyway, on our arrival the cottage owner gave us a tour of the property and, in the bathroom, remarked, ‘and there’s a power shower above the bath’.

I remember thinking to myself, ‘oh, that sounds nice – not just a shower but a POWER shower’. I pictured stepping beneath the shower, flicking the on switch, and being almost knocked off my feet by a torrent of water gushing out of the showerhead with the force of Niagara Falls. I could barely wait to use it.

The next morning I got in said shower. I was excited, I mean when you’ve got two young children having 15 minutes or so peace anywhere – whether that be the shower, the toilet, or simply locking yourself in the coat cupboard - is one of the highlights of the day.

The shower, I noted with growing exhilaration, was named Mira Sport. It sounded exotic and serious, like a shower for athletes, the kind you’d step into after, say, a long sweaty Olympic qualifying hockey game.

There were three setting on the shower - low, eco, and high. I’ve never quite seen the point of this. I mean who in their right mind would get in a shower and set it to low?

Clearly I switched it to high and pressed the on button, taking care to stand back in case the power of the water was too strong.

A trickle of water emerged from the showerhead and flopped forlornly into the bath.

This couldn’t be right. It’s a power shower. The cottage owner clearly stated power shower. And surely the point of a power shower is that it has at least a little bit of power.

I bashed it a few times with the palm of my hand (a DIY skill I learned from my father) and tried altering the setting to low and then eco – whatever the hell that meant - but the flow of the water did not change one iota.

I looked at the showerhead. It was absolutely massive and had – and I know this because I spent several moments counting them (my life really is that empty) - 88 holes for the water to come out of. However, when the shower was turned on, the water only came out of six of them. No wonder the bloody thing wasn’t working properly.

All this was clearly a disappointment but things weren’t going to get any better, so I stepped beneath the miniscule trickle, only to discover another problem.

It was one of those showers you only find in holiday homes, static caravans or outdated leisure centre changing rooms, in that the temperature of the water begins at a point so hot it melts your skin, then gradually cools to a temperature just about acceptable, before turning freezing cold - then suddenly without warning gets boiling again. From start to finish this whole cyclical process took about 12 seconds, so you have around five or six seconds when the temperature is just about Ok to jump in and wash yourself, before leaping out again before you suffer either third degree burns or hypothermia.

My entire shower was like a weird slightly damp hokey cokie and it took me the best part of 35 minutes to wash the shampoo from my hair.

I hasten to add - in case of a potential lawsuit – that this almost certainly wasn’t the fault of the Mira Sport shower. I have read online reviews and it seems like a perfectly fine shower.

Indeed only last week a Mr Larry Randall wrote on the Trust Pilot website, ‘I am very pleased with my shower and like the Eco button. It is very easy to fit and use’, to which Mira replied: ‘Hi Larry, thank you for the excellent feedback. We are very pleased to hear that you are so happy with your new Mira shower’ … it really was quite a fascinating correspondence.

So it was probably more likely the water pressure or connection or some other plumbing issue but, whatever, it did not make for a pleasant cleansing experience at a house which cost us just shy of £1,000 to hire for the week.

What’s that, I hear you cry, stop complaining to us and complain to the owner? Are you mad?

Of course I’m not going to do that, I’m way too British.

I did, for a brief moment I confess, contemplate writing in the Guest Book at the end of our stay, ‘lovely stay and lovely house, though shower slightly disappointing’ but I couldn’t bring myself to be so rebellious.

If we go again next year, I’ll take my own hosepipe.