Everyday life in the Old World, to be exact. Aaargh! How could they stick me with this one? They said it’s because I see so many types of people all the time, and have the clearest perspective. Then they all went out for drinks at The Cloak and Dagger. A bit suspicious, if you ask me. At any rate, the problem I’m facing is that I don’t think there really is anything like an everyday life. Some people go to work early, like bakers, and smithies who want to get their forges all stoked up. If you don’t have some sort of work early on, you can leisurely get out of bed and wander bleary-eyed down to the nearest breakfast stand, or crawl into a café for some tea and pastries.
At some point, most of us have to work, whether we’re servers or work at the laundry, or drive carriages, or build ships, or mix dyes or train horses. If I don’t own my own business, I’m slated to be there at, say, three hours after sunrise.
Now an hour is a roughly defined sort of entity – I’ve seen sand glasses which mark an hour at quite a bit longer or shorter than the hour marked by the one next to it. So no one knows how many hours are in a day or anything like that, but we all have a sort of approximate idea of what one is. I’ve heard that they have a ‘master’ sand glass in Masalla, which has the ‘official’ hour, but due to some disagreement among the members of the glass-blowers guilds or something, there are quite a few unsettled disputes. You can obviously tell I’m very out of my realms of knowledge here.
As I was saying, I would be slated to arrive three hours after sunrise, so I estimate my arrival and my fellow workers will filter in around the same time. If I’m consistently late, I’ll probably get a talking-to. Then I’ll put in a good day of work, say six hours or so, and then I’ll be free once again, taking home probably forty or fifty silver if I have an average commoner job. The nights are for going to restaurants, getting together with friends, going to parties, or pursuing one’s own personal interests.
Of course, there are those who earn their gold by other means. On one side are the outlaws, who take gold by disreputable means. I hear that you can make a lot of gold in a short while if you’re a good thief or a skilled twylah, but you tend to get in trouble with the city guard or lose your reputation pretty fast doing that sort of stuff.
Then there are the wealthy, who own businesses or trading ships, and I’ve heard that some of them don’t work at all, but rather hire others to work for them. Pretty plush.
And we can’t forget, of course, all those people like adventurers and knights and mercenaries who earn their gold in other ways, and don’t have a ‘work’ to go to like the rest of the world.
Of course, I shouldn’t be speaking, as I’m now doing nothing for work except going to restaurants and bathhouses for Illumination, and all I have to do is write up reviews for them! Vicious, yes?
Great. Just after I got done bragging, Brant came in here and told me that not only was my writing horribly informal, but that I had missed the point of this little essay, which is that I’m supposed to write about everyday life things that everyone goes through. Why didn’t they just call it the "bodily functions treatise"?
Fine. They want it, they’ll get it.
Potty time. This is for the big cities where people don’t just go in privies or out in the fields.
People keep chamber pots in their bedrooms, often in a private little nook. After rinsing with water and perhaps a small cloth if you’re rich, you either take it outside or have a servant take it outside (again, if you’re rich). Outside every house in Aranor there is a wax-lined barrel, some of which (in Aranor at least), even have a magical, sweet scent illusioned over them. The chamber pot is emptied into here, and once every passage a city employed "poop remover" comes and takes your barrel, leaving a fresh, empty one. The full barrels they take to a number of places – either to large ‘richhills’ out by the peasants’ fields, where I’m told that it decays for a time and then is used to enrich the soil, or they are dumped in the ocean from a ship. I’ve also heard that some places dump them in swamps. But a lot of it, I know, is used on the fields. Which is disgusting, but since I’m not doing it, it’s fine by me.
Our teeth. Someone long ago learned that our teeth collect muck, and that if it’s left there, our teeth rot out. So we brush and scrape them – small wooden instruments are used to scrape the muck away, and to ‘file’ between the teeth, and toothbrushes, or sticks with a head of boar-bristle, are used to smooth and polish them. It’s been found that a concoction of water and chalk helps to polish them shiny, and every vanity will have a small jar of this mixture, along with various oils, such as peppermint, cinnamon, clove, pine, or rose, which can be added to sweeten the breath. And if any do rot, a healer who possesses the ‘gift’ can make them healthy again.
Bathing. Cleanliness is said to be a virtue, and I’d not disagree. There are three main ways of bathing. The first, and easiest, is to jump into any available river or stream and scrub off. The second is to sponge oneself, using a basin and sponge or cloth. The third is to find yourself some lavish bath and enjoy the luxuries of oils and soaps. Some large cities even have bathhouses where you can pay a fee and have a public or private bath.
The bath itself is a grand affair. The actual space that holds the water is most often depressed into the floor, so that when you enter it you step down into the water, like a pool. Baths are usually tiled around the edges and made of glazed ceramic or lacquered wood. They are kept filled with water, and have a large stone bowl on the bottom. If someone wants a hot bath, they must first heat rocks over a stove – bath stones are kept in a metal netting or are loose – when they are hot, you can either don a glove and carry over the net (this method is usually quite heavy), or you can use a fork and carry the stones over one by one, depositing them carefully in the stone bath-bowl. They soon begin to heat your water, making it nice and steamy and warm.
After a bath has been used a number of times, it must be emptied and cleaned. Most have a plug which drains them to the outside, while some must be emptied bucket by bucket if they are in the heart of the house. The bath then gets a good scrubbing, and is re-filled, usually bucket by bucket, to be ready for another round of baths.
Baths, you can see, are quite a luxury.
Now I can’t think of what else they’d want on this subject, so I’m leaving it at that and going to see if any taverns are still open!
Composed by-
