Shaving by Candlelight

For those of you that don't know the bathroom in my flat it has a frosted, blue glass arch around the doorway. It wasn't frosted when we moved in, but that's a whole other story. It also has glazed windows which lead out onto a huge square full of streetlights. This has very little relevance to the following story, but bare with me, it's important.

Getting back from work where I'd been lifting and moving all day, I was kinda sweaty so I immediately jumped in the shower. The shower radio was set to Classic FM (it surprisingly good to shower to, most of the time). The problem with this radio is that thanks to it's position it's remarkably hard to find a station with a good signal, so changing it is hardly ever done. If you do happen to change it then you pretty much stick with the first station you find since you'll never find it again, or any other station, if you carry on looking.

Unfortunately this time Classic FM was doing the travel news. Now I might be a little weird here but listening to the travel news in the shower when you don't drive doesn't really seem like my cup of tea. With some trepidation I changed the station - and immediately found some weird, possibly Israeli, radio station that to be honest I didn't know existed. However it was playing music, and I knew that I'd never find another if I carried on looking. So I bit the bullet and went with it. I mean what else could I do?

So there I was, showering away to this bizarre station, when the lights started to flicker. At first I thought the circuit was going or there was a power fluctuation. Then the lights cut out - but only the lights in the bathroom. This left me showering to weird Israeli music lit on one side by the blue glow through the glass arch, and on the other side by the orange street lights from the square. It was truly surreal.

I finally finished showering and, after a quick fiddle around with the bulbs to check they worked, I came to the conclusion that there's some dodgy wiring in the ceiling somewhere that finally failed. So no lights in the bathroom.

Which left me with the interesting prospect of working out how on earth I was supposed to shave. Since I have a heap of candles in my room the obvious answer was by candlelight. It worked surprisingly well. It somehow gave a much more powerful feel to the experience. Next time you shave (if you do shave) I recommend it. It's... freeing in a way.

It also returned me to a realisation that I've had a number of times - all the events of our lives are essentially meaningless. They're simply defined by the moments where for some strange reason something simple and ordinary is promoted to something that is somehow sublimely powerful. It can be anything: a look, a laugh, a smile, a tear or even a shave.

It's a moment that you can't plan and you can't predict but which nevertheless tells you that everything is going to be okay. Somehow, it's all going to just work out okay.