All Mod Cons

One of the fun things in writing Petty Treason was a small bit I got to do using an outhouse. People who wax rhapsodic about the olden days forget that the sanitary facilities were either a pot under your bed or a small noisome chamber in the back yard. Even as late as the Regency, most houses had privies or "necessary houses" (there are a whole bunch of quaint euphemisms for outhouse from that period) and there were professionals--"gold finders!"--who cleaned and serviced them. If, of course, you had the money to pay such a person. I suspect those on the lower end of the economic strata just held their nose and went. London is built atop a network of streams and small rivers (Fleet Street was once the River Fleet), most of them long forgotten, but I wonder how much the groundwater was contaminated by the seeping of thousands of privies all over the city. There were some sewers and city water pipes at that point (pipes were made of logs!) but indoor plumbing--and workable sewers--were not widespread for decades; well into the twentieth century some people didn't have indoor plumbing at all.

I was thinking about this this morning as I took my shower. Without planning it, the first thing I say when I get into the shower is always some variation on "God, I love hot water." And I do. The shower is the place where I can be safe from intrusion for ten minutes, warming up and getting clean and thinking about the day, the book, or whatever I've read in the paper while making school lunches. That hot water is also what soothes my chronically stiff and achy shoulders and begins the slow process of really waking up (which process finishes up sometime aroung 10am, when I've had my second cup of coffee). I've always liked knowing where things come from, and how things work, so I have a good idea of where city water actually comes from, how it arrives in the city, and what happens when it gets into the house. (I had to learn a good deal about this stuff when I was writing The Stone War. Plus, I'm a geek.) And so "God, I love hot water" is not only a paean of praise for hot water itself, but for the technology which delivers it to me. In the wake of Katrina's devastation I am more than usually appreciative, of course.

So I started wondering: what modern convenience do you praise, or should you be praising?