For the past seven years, I’ve been chronically depressed, and, oh, the trials and tribulations I’ve encountered. Some horrendous, but others, as I’m about to explain, not so bad. In fact, if it weren’t for being sick, some (selected) wonders would have remained completely unknown to me. Weird how that happens.

Some boring background first: I was coming onto my third year of being sick. A struggling, (mainly) self-supporting university undergraduate, I was forced to accept defeat and crawl home to the parental fold. This left me with some money to play with, for the first time in a very long time. Not for food, or prescribed texts, or sheet music, or rent.

So armed with some cash and determined to find a non-pharmaceutical way to alleviate my many depressive symptoms, I decided a good way to go was by trial-testing various bath products. I’d decided that I was going to give regular bathing – for relaxation purposes – a bit of a revival. Would it work?

Ah, the humble tub! Why the hell had I ignored it for so long? I came from England, where the bathtub was all there was. No shower cubicles, or shower heads (many-fangled shower-like attachments now exist, but not 20 or so years ago). Before you ask, yes, we were in the habit of bathing more than once a week, despite living in England, so none of those jokes.

When my family first moved to Australia, the notion of a bathroom having both a tub and a shower cubicle seemed like pure genius to me. I was only eight at the time. To a kid straight out of Thatcher's England, the bath-shower combination seemed excessive and opulent, in a cheesy Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous kind of way. Oh those '80s.

As my brother and I entered adulthood a decade later, it occurred to me that none of the family took those gloriously indulgent soaks I recalled from when we first arrived here. No one ever had time – not even for a yearly one. There were some explanations offered: “I’ll have one on my day off, when I can enjoy it more,” or “It’s too much trouble to clean afterwards,” or “Too many things to do today,” – very grown-up reasons, I thought.

Or excuses, perhaps?

Were we really that busy that we all had our ready-made excuses for avoiding the chance to melt our worries away in nice, warm water and get clean simultaneously?

My mother is easily the busiest person in our family. She looks after most of the housekeeping, works part-time as a nurse (not the easiest of occupations), and has a family overseas that she also looks after, both emotionally and financially. She’s always exhausted and aching. Despite my continuous begging, she never consents to taking a relaxing bath, which is sad. It could do so much for her mood, and replenish her energy levels, not to mention loosen tight, knotted muscles. Sadly, for both our sanities (alas, she is not the most serene of persons to live with at times), she never takes the time to take time out.