When I was a kid, our TV was in a television cabinet. For those unfamiliar with this preposterous abomination, it was a box on legs into which the TV was placed to hide it. It was some sort of furniture hangover from the era of covering a piano’s ankles lest they cause lustful sweats to break out under the starched collars of young gentlemen.
The trouble is, a two-doored, TV-shaped-and-sized box in the corner of the room where the TV would usually be, cables trailing from its rear and armchairs angled towards it, was about as good a disguise as when a child lacking object permanence puts its hand up to its eyes and assumes the rest of the world can’t see it.
The other thing is: the TV didn’t need a box. It already had a box built round it. It even had a nickname, in case that wasn’t evident enough: “the box”.
A box does not need a box. And so, in the same vein, a sink does not need a second sink sitting in it.
The washing-up bowl is indefensible. Think on this as you wash your Christmas dishes. A bowl within a bowl. A water receptacle within a water receptacle. It does everything the sink does, and less. It doesn’t drain, for one thing. It has to be emptied into the sink for that to happen. (Although there are now some with plugholes, as if the pointlessness of this recursive arrangement needed underlining ad absurdum.)
For something that deals with water and the making cleaner of things, the washing-up bowl has some unsavoury side effects: that sump of waterlogged food clinging to its bottom, for instance. Or the fact that, over time, it becomes furry, sprouting little mussel-like beards of plastic.
That’s the other thing. This unnecessary, unhygienic, wan-coloured prophylactic, like so much other tat designed to keep us at one remove from the reality of our homes (toilet-seat lid covers, plug-in air fresheners) is landfill-in-waiting.
“But it saves water!” cry its approbators. What arrant balls. If the logic here is that it holds less water than a sink, then first, it isn’t much of a saving and, second, less water can be used in the sink. Using less water saves water. Using a receptacle within a receptacle doesn’t.
If you put a large plastic bath-shaped tub in your bath before bathing, people would rightly think you’d lost your mind. Let your sink be proudly naked. Ban the bowl.