Shiny sparkly things

My landlord just installed The World’s Most Absurd Shower in my flat. My landlord is a top bloke and I won’t hear a word said against him, but he does have a terrible weakness for shiny sparkly gadgets. His wife doesn’t let him play with them at home so he’s constantly installing wildly impractical thingamajigs in my place. Many of them are of questionable taste and all of them are made of cheap plastic and go ‘beep’ a lot. The World’s Most Absurd Shower is, so far, the peak of this trend. I wouldn’t mind if he insisted on foisting a 42-inch plasma screen on me but no, I get a remote-controlled shower that plays Radio Maria at you and allows you to answer the phone whilst soaping your armpits. I’m not kidding, this thing is incredible. It has three different lights in it, including a bank of blinking blue LEDs (very tasteful), a radio that seemed to be permanently tuned to Christian talk shows, and a dozen different nozzles that can spurt water in unexpected places without warning. I have all of these things turned off all of the time. Apart from when I’m showing off it’s absurdity to visitors.

Pan Landlord loves all this stuff and is immensely proud of The World’s Most Absurd Shower. He insists on looking in on it whenever he comes round. Sometimes he invents reasons to come round just so that he can have a peak at it. He’s also immensely proud of the fact that it’s ‘Made in Poland,’ a characteristic that fills me with vague uneasiness in the context of a water-filled device plugged into the electrical main. Perhaps I’m being unfair.

Poland is full of these immensely tasteless and tacky bits of gimcrack. Lamps that play Chopin when you turn them on, clocks adorned with illuminated cuckoos, rotating plastic statuettes of Jesus, and a million other products of the fevered neo-capitalist mind. You can understand their appeal for a generation that grew up in the grey and non-shiny era of the 60s and 70s, but the tide of new money has fueled an alarming explosion of these things. One day they’ll be worth a fortune as examples of early 21st century kitsch.

Have to go now, my doorbell is playing number 3 of 16 random melodies and if I don’t get to it within 30 seconds I may be compelled to blow my brains out.