MY FIRST POST FROM JULY 2016

Have you ever noticed how lavatories, both public and private, often seem to reflect national characteristics?

America, of course, has the biggest ones, massive monuments to capitalism in gleaming white porcelain and shiny chrome. Fold down sanitised paper cut outs cover the seat, “for your safety and convenience”, pardon the pun. If you get a dose of clap or crabs in the United States you cannot claim to have caught it from a toilet seat; neither do they have graffiti in public loos, as most graffiti is ironic and they don’t understand irony, neither would they condone vandalism even if mitigated by being witty and amusing. When you flush a lavatory in the US about twenty-five gallons of blue coloured, sterilised, deodorised, detoxified water sluices down in a sort of whirlpool, you never need a second flush. Even the urinals are proper, stable sized stalls, and offer unparalleled privacy and cleanliness. The urinals all have an automatic or manual flush and you will get a dirty look or even a comment if you micturate and walk away leaving traces to offend the nostrils of those who come after. All this of course is in white middle class America, in the poorer parts there is poverty to rival anything in the third world. The people who live there consider themselves lucky if they have a bush to go behind. 

In the UK Victorians were the first to universally introduce clean water, WC’s, and sewerage systems in towns and cities, an initiative that has almost certainly saved many more lives than the medical profession. As you would expect, our loos are by now state of the art in terms of efficiency combined with the economical use of water and many of the public sewers, state if the art in Victorian times are still in use. You may need a second flush with an British loo but not every time and there is always a brush in a pot at the side in case of pebble dashing. Thomas Crapper, who is often wrongly attributed with inventing the flush toilet, did, however, do much to popularise them and probably was the inventor of the ball valve for wc cisterns. It has to be said that initially even the better off Victorians tended to build their facilities outdoors as it was considered unhygienic to have them indoors. Eventually, Thomas Crapper and his eminent and sometimes royal customers brought the wc indoors, but only for the better off. The working classes still had to go outside and freeze their arses off, for many well into the nineteen sixties. As with all other aspects of Victorian life the Art Nouveau movement created some very elaborately decorated conveniences and Lady Lucinda Lambton’s excellent book “Temples of Convenience” has many examples.

If we move on to Austria, the birth place of psycho-analysis, and Germany the wc’s have a built in shelf at the rear of the pan where your turds sit, waiting to be examined by those of a scatological bent, prior to flushing away. I sometimes wonder if Freud suffered from constipation and that was what gave rise to the term “anal retentive”.

 In France the loos are dirty and vary from the “having seen this do I really want to eat in this establishment” found in expensive restaurants down even further to the really disgusting. However, in French bathrooms there is usually a bidet so you can wash your nether regions in preparation for or following sex, never quite sure what the etiquette is regarding that. I have had French girlfriends but that was in England so no bidets. Personally, I prefer my nether regions to be clean when starting a sexual encounter but the French I must say are not always so fastidious. Jane Fonda, when she was in a relationship with Roger Vadam would infuriate him by rushing off to wash herself immediately after sex when she should have been lying on the bed with him for a post coital Gaulois.

Japanese loos are high tech, all you have to do is sit there do the business and the loo will give you a squirt of warm cleansing water up the butt and a gentle waft of warm air to dry you. Gentlemen who do not know Japanese symbols should leave it on full automatic and refrain from pushing any buttons, one of them is a tampon remover which has led to surprises and even injuries when deployed by a male. Looking at the Japanese mentality and urge for innovation it is only a matter of time before they come up with a loo that has a screen showing porn and gently masturbates you at the end of a stressful day. In fact, they have been beaten to it by the Chinese who already have a wanking machine used for harvesting sperm for artificial insemination.   

Greek loos on the whole are pretty basic, though usually clean, but even in the most expensive hotels you have to put your paper in the bin as the infrastructure apparently cannot handle it. Greek people tell me that many of these small bore systems were installed by the British in the 1930’s but I find that hard to believe, given the vast experience we had in this field. As with so many things Greek, they had one of the earliest civilisations, but have gone downhill ever since. However, they are lovely people and I have holidayed in Greece many times, we love them, they love us and we make allowances for Greece that nowhere else would get away with. However, archeologists tell us that the Palace of Knossos, in Crete, had flushing toilets in the Minoan period around 2000 BC, thus predating the Victorians by nearly 4000 years.

 In many parts of Eastern Europe and especially countries that were in the former Soviet Union they have holes in the floor, the more expensive places have better decorated holes in the floor. This is probably due to the communist regime preserving old buildings, which in the West would have been pulled down and replaced. Turkey had these until about twenty years ago and one often saw a conversion where the hole in the floor had a WC plonked over it, creating a sort of moat around the loo. Useful I suppose for men with a bad aim, although I must say women are not immune from this. I once had a girl friend who, due to an excessive sense of hygiene would not sit on a strange loo seat, and would crouch and piss from a great height. Unfortunately, she also had a habit of not lifting the seat first; a complete reversal of the usual complaint from women that men always leave it up. Whenever we stayed with or visited friends I always had to go to the loo just after her and wipe the splashes off the seat, as a man I would automatically have got the blame.

In expensive Egyptian hotels a man with a warm towel starts sidling towards you as you are washing your hands, fortunately not while you are having a piss, as soon as you have washed them he hands you the towel and has his hand out for baksheesh, as with everything in Egypt. The vulgar rich have bathrooms where everything just has to be expensive special marble tiles that cost £500 each and so on. When I first went to London I was assisting a photographer who was producing a catalogue for a manufacturer of very expensive bathrooms. We were doing a bathroom room set which featured solid gold taps and fittings destined for a client in The Middle East. They arrived at the studio in a Securicor van with two guards who watching them at all times.

Of course we should also be aware that about a third of the world population don’t have any loos at all and often have to carry out their ablutions in public! I will never forget the culture shock I experienced when I went to work in Warri in Nigeria on the 70’s. We were driving along the road from the tiny airport; it was a dirt road with a drainage ditch along the side. Women in colorful dresses balancing incredible loads on their heads would stop, hitch up their dress and piss in the ditch still balancing the loads on their heads.

NOW IT’S A CRIME TO BE OLD.

This post was first published several weeks ago, then I took it off. For the reason why see post “Thank you for your patience” 24th April. Now is the time to put it back on again. As usual I was just ahead of my time and others even officials are starting to say the same thing, even if not agreeing with my suggestion for what to do about it.

I find it deeply disturbing that the government is even considering making over 70s stay at home for 4 MONTHS. That would be bad enough for me and I have a big house and garden and can walk out of my front door onto the fells, but for someone who lives in a high rise block in a city it is unimaginable. I become more and more convinced that we are living in a covert fascist state, it is starting to become more overt and we need to fight back. This idea is extremely discriminatory and ageist. Imagine if the at-risk group were Asian people, black people, Jewish people or even LGBT people, the government wouldn’t even dare consider treating them any differently. Old people are treated as though they are not capable of thinking for themselves, they are ripped out of their homes by social workers and often families who want get their hands on the equity in their houses; “its for your own god mum”,  and dumped in boxes in towns where they live like prisoners. All they have to do is sit in a chair all day and have their, usually disgusting slop, meals at prescribed times. The NHS tend to view old age as a “condition” to be “managed” by “professionals” usually with medication, the old people might be safer this way but have been stripped of purpose and quality of life. We need to think about making quality of life the priority rather than keeping alive at all costs.

Now “they” are contemplating putting everyone under house arrest when they reach 70, the criterion doesn’t even make sense, I am much more hale and hearty than many people in their 50’s, when I am out on the fells I meet people much older than me. Whatever, I certainly won’t be complying with it; if I didn’t have my hands full fighting “The Man” on other matters I would be organising mass civil disobedience. Hundreds of over 70s congregating and sticking two fingers up to authority. How on earth could it be enforced anyway? The police tell us that because of Coronovirus they will only be able to investigate crimes where there is body, no change there then. What are they going to do? Stop people on the street and demand identity documents, road blocks? I would suggest in that scenario just say your name is Johnny Freedom and refuse to provide identity. What could they do? They would have to arrest you take you to the police station, finger print you, book you, put you in a cell and arrange a court appearance within 24 hrs? The police cells would soon be overflowing with OAPs.

I wonder why there has been such a knee jerk reaction in the first place, a very small percentage of the population has become infected and an even smaller percentage have anything other than minor symptoms. You are more likely to be knocked down by a bus. There are many greater problems than the dreaded virus. Overpopulation, plastic and other pollution global warming to name but a few, but they are just swept under the carpet. Overreaction and collateral damage will cause far more problems than the physical damage caused by the virus itself. Just ignore it treat it like a cold, some people will die but we are overpopulated anyway. It could even be a good thing, eventually we might even realise that all those people who are wage slaves and doing unnecessary crap jobs could be freed from the cycle. And we could come up with a better alternative system.

If as I believe the planet is one huge organism, Gaia hypothesis, and we are a blight overwhelming and destroying it. It could well be that as we are the problem, viruses could be one of the ways the planet cures itself from us. This might be a trial run, the next one could have a 50% or more fatality rate. A good cull of the human population is what is needed down to about 10% of what it is now, it could even summon in a golden age. People reaching their full potential instead of chasing money and living in harmony with each other and the planet, I won’t be holding my breath though.

I will be enlarging on this in a future post.

BANG, BANG.

My friend has a sister who lives in the US. She lives in a good neighbourhood, but nevertheless a few nights ago she was awoken in the early hours by the sound of someone trying to break into her house, she was alone. They were not very efficient burglars, they failed to gain entry but continued to rattle and bang for a full twenty minutes, which gave her plenty of time to call the cops. Four patrol cars arrived, and the perps ran off, but were arrested a few minutes later. It was a couple of young guys, drunk. As a result, her partner, who is often away on business, bought her a gun. When the cops came back to fill in some paperwork, she told them she now had a gun. That’s fine ma’am one of them said, just don’t shoot anyone in the back and there’ll be no problem. It amazes me that anyone would even think about burgling an occupied or potentially occupied house in the US when there is a good chance they will be met by a householder with a gun. Also, in the US to get a criminal record at a young age pretty much maps out your future life, which will be a downward spiral.

I would love to be able to go into a shop present my driving licence and buy pretty much any type of gun I wanted. However, I would not love to think that everyone else could do the same.