La la la...hmm hmm, tee dee...

Drip. Drip. Drip.

No, that’s not the rain. It is, in fact, a dripping shower. It just struck me that I have some sadistic tendencies. Where did that come from?, you say?. Well, lemme tell you…

I would be the first to admit the inadequacy of my vocal talents. That is to say, a diplomat would probably say my voice is…interesting. And everyone knows how diplomatic diplomats are. (Hey! So that’s why they’re called that, huh! They’re diplomatic…hence they’re called…diplomats [or is it the other way around?] Brilliant! Who came up with it?!) And then add that to my penchant for singing in the shower. Well. You get what I’m trying to get at, I see.

And no, it’s not just me. Lots of people sing in the shower, regardless of the torment their voices cause to their fellow creatures outside the hallowed walls of the bathroom. And I wonder… what inspires them to break into song in the bathroom?

Is it the echo? Bathrooms usually echo, you know. Try talking on the phone to someone who is in the loo. Ok, strike that thought out. Yeesh. Anyway… So maybe, by some freakish twist of fate, the singer’s yodeling echoes back and sounds like a sweet melody drifting down from heaven.

Or… is it some residual primitive-caveman-type instinct for singing in the rain? That could be it. They even made a movie about it, didn’t they? So, maybe in a rain-like setting, i.e., the shower, our less civilized and rather primitive, baser instincts take over… and we break into song! I mean, I can really imagine one of my half-chimp forebears coming out of his cave one morning and stumbling across a water-fall and taking his first ever shower. In his great joy, (for he has discovered the great wonder of showers even if not the comforts of indoor plumbing and hot water) he must have started doing some imitation of singing, which then promptly buried itself if his sub-conscious, only to emerge several millennia later with the re-discovery of the luxury of the shower, and yes, this time with indoor plumbing and hot-water! Wow! That sounds like quite a theory… and I’ve even made a load of dingo’s kidney sound like something scientific!

And then there’s the whole issue of the choice of song/tune. Some days, I find myself humming/screeching/yelling/yodeling my favourite tune. Which is quite natural, I assume. But then, there are other days when I suddenly stop mid-way through the shower and realize that I’m actually singing some embarrassing little radio or ad jingle. Which won’t get off my head and horrors of horrors! I’m humming the bleddy thing all through the day, and in college too! And it’s quite embarrassing, lemme tell you, even if you’re only humming it in your head and you know that there’s no one around to hear it but you.

Well, I give up. The reason for both singing and the songs we choose elude me! It is a puzzle that scientists will be baffled by both now and a millennium hence, I am sure.