On this our fifth night in a New Zealand hotel room, I have to report something extraordinary. A modern innovation that appears to have passed this country by. New Zealanders travelling abroad will have encountered this incredibly useful modern bathroom aid. Yet the fact that it seems not to exist here suggests either that no native of this country has ever returned to these shores from his travels to discourse on this remarkable device or that New Zealanders don't bath or wash when overseas.

To what do I refer, I hear you cry.

Well, before you run a bath, what do you do? You place a plug in the plug-hole. You then run the bath etc etc. Where do you find the plug?  Well on the end of the chain of course.....well not in this country. Bath or wash basin, the first game you play here is hunt-the-plug. It is never on the end of a chain, because here they haven't discovered the bath chain. The plug is sometimes on the side of the bath, sometimes by the basin, sometimes in a drawer or pot, but never ever attached to the f###*** bath by a f###*** chain. Finding the perishing thing can be quick and easy or it can take a prolonged hunt through every nook and crannie in the room. 

So far, we have been successful every time, but will some public-spirited kiwi please take this nation out of the dark ages and introduce THE BATH CHAIN.   

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