Shimmyin' in the Shower

[captlychee]

It's very rare that I even pay attention to the advertisements that clog my free to air TV feed as I sit impatiently waiting for something watchable to emerge from some sort of human intelligence, which hardly ever happens—I mean, look at the latest series of "Death in Paradise"—but you can live in hope. One day, however, I actually was paying attention to one of these ads, and it was for a thing called a 'Shimmy Scrub'. The idea is that this plastic thing has massaging knobs and soft bristles on it and you can scrub your back by shimmying—a kind of dance—to clean it.
"Holy crap," I said. "That's a fucking good idea." Nobody heard me, of course, which is why I'm telling you now.

These things were supplied by a company called Global Shop Direct. They are constantly on TV, between ads for insurance, funeral insurance, incontinence pads, incontinence insurance, funeral pads and, at night, local merchants (where 'local' can often mean South Australia, south east New South wales, Warrnambool, and occasionally somewhere nearby). They're one of these places that sell frying pans, massage chairs, pillowcases, nuclear weapons, and incontinence pads, all of which are payable on instalment plans. I just assume that whatever they sell is going to be junk, so their blandishments go straight through to the keeper.

But this blandishment particularly appealed to me because it seemed to offer a solution to a vexing problem. How do you scrub your own back? In my younger days, I was dexterous enough to shake hands, as it were, behind my back, but even I have to admit that I can't do that anymore and in any case I can't apply a great deal of pressure to any scrubbing I might do. Couple that with the gradual buildup of skin cells and fatty deposits on my back and you end up with a white, hairy clump of dermatological Armageddon back there. So, on seeing this solution, I kept the ad in mind…for a few weeks. Eventually, I got around to going to the website to order the damn thing.

This was less hideously painful than I had thought. I expected something as frantic as Pizza Hut or the Victorian Government in demanding my contact details, but no. They wanted a postal address for delivery, and they let me pay by PayPal, which kept my credit card details secret, and they only wanted my email address to send me a receipt—well, so far that's all they've sent, anyway.

Imagine my surprise and delight when, yesterday, just after some idiot phone call from some idiot or other, the postie turns up with a package! On opening the plastic bag I discovered:

I scrabbled open the package and leapt into the shower, eager to try it out. The first aspect of it is that the rubber, or plastic, or ersatz rubber or whatever it's made of is that kind of sticky, rubbery plastic that reminds me of Slime. But it did have massage knobs and soft bristles. So I hopped in and soaped it up.

By Crikey, it did a good job. The sensation of these bristles rubbing across the ol' dorsal section was actually quite pleasant. Indeed, if I were thirty years younger it would've produced quite the reaction… Anyway, it also did a great job of cleaning up the hair back there, and presumably giving a wash and brush-up to those little clumps of skin cells and oils that go by the name 'backne' and always make me think of incipient bedsores.

Here's a picture of the item and the things it replaces:

I might keep the green thing to do the ol' feet, but I am certainly replacing this bloody brush:

Will it replace someone else giving your back a scrub? It won't replace my darling Kelvatari or Faye Grant brought forward from 1984, but for the time being it will damn near do.