Saturday 15 September 2018

Catching Up with Our Correspondence

There comes a time in every toilet blogger's life when it becomes impossible to ignore the onslaught of amusing contributions from friends and acquaintances any longer. We have been busily engaged with mere survival, holing up in our metaphorical hill fort and mending baskets, pickling vegetables and otherwise preparing for winter, but today we're going to make an oh-fuck-it, death-and/or-glory raid into the murky barbarian border lands of bog-bloggery. Alors, on avance!

Let's get the grim, serious stuff over and done with first. Are you, by any chance, thinking of getting married? Frankly, we advise against it, especially if you're a woman. If you insist on going through with this antiquated ceremony, even after pondering the cost, the divorce statistics and the fact that marriage is an institution built on the assumption that a woman is a piece of chattel to be traded between men, like a sheep, then that is your headache, we guess - free will and all that.

If you have further bought into the sexist notion of the white wedding dress, symbolising the bride's chastity, which in turn ensures that any offspring will definitely carry the DNA of the customer/groom, then you should at least be aware that there is a gadget that ensures your dress stays white even if you should be unfortunate enough to, contrary to patriarchal assumptions, have bodily functions. Here is a video that demonstrates this product.



The same friend who sent us the above video also treated us to a picture of a toilet roll that was horrifyingly turned the wrong way round, but that our friend had the presence of mind to secretly flip, guerilla-warfare-style. We applaud you, anonymous friend!

It also turns out that we are far from alone in worrying about the state of public toilets. In some places, public toilets don't even exist, making the issue of whether they are equipped with mixer taps and sturdy coat hooks appear to be a luxurious first-world problem for the impossibly privileged to ponder in their rampantly ample spare time (this may be true either way).

In Greece, for instance, we learned that public toilets are virtually non-existent, but that cafés and restaurants are happy to let you nip in and use their facilities. Britain, that land of rampant plumbing insanity, is also experiencing a worrying lack of public facilities, according to a BBC article sent to us by a friend. It seems that "UK councils stopped maintaining around 13% of public toilets between 2010 and 2018", indicating that the brutal Tory policy of shouting "Austerity!" while yanking away vital support and services has had an effect on the nation's toilets. We all thought that British bogs couldn't get any worse, but obviously we were wrong.

Continuing the theme of non-existent toilets, Feisty French Friend sent us a video of a toilet cubicle in Cambodia without toilets. Facebook won't let us share said video via any other medium than its own platform. Luckily for our regular readers, however, we have resorted to the lo-fi but practical move of filming our computer screen. View the result, if you can bear it, below:


What would a bog blog update be without photos from everyone's favourite piece of boom-boom-boombastic babe? Dull beyond endurance! Let us quickly look at these pictures kindly sent by Jonny, who says, "Never seen stocks in a toilet before!"

The mind boggles!

We don't know about you, but we find ourselves paralyzed by the sheer very-something-ness of this picture.

We can never quite decide how we feel about the objectification of males. We seem to remember once being in favour of male nudity. However, we are also reminded of the disturbing toilet pornography present in the Lizard King bar in Torun, Poland, and also the Cock and Bull in Aberdeenshire, and suddenly feel queasy. Pornography contributes to rape culture: can everyone please decorate their toilet walls with something that doesn't glamorise abuse?

The toilet looks functional and there is no lack of toilet roll. That, at least, is non-objectionable.

If you feel a sudden urge to enjoy these feisty facilities, get your arse down to the Viaduct Showbar in Leeds! (Do by all means remind the management that pornography is recorded abuse.)

We feel like it would be irresponsible to end without some intellectual stimulation, and therefore hasten to share with you pictures of pieces of Roman wall, provided by Shewee Fiend Friend, who says:
I haven't got any toilet pictures for you in Bulgaria yet because there is either no toilet and just a hole, or the toilet makes me think something like, "how do you even get that X [insert effluvia here] on that part of the toilet?
However, here is a piece of [third-century] Roman Wall just hanging out beside me at the café we're at.

Mmm, there's nothing like pondering some Roman bricks to put the zip back in your day!

If this is not enough for you and you crave more Roman bricks in Bulgaria: GET IT HERE.

 Let us relax, finally, with a Festive Video. We spent all summer enduring a weird and disturbing heat wave, and literally praying for rain. Consequently we found this song playing on repeat at the back of our melting mind.



Festive Video: Sarah Darling, Where Cowboys Ride

Salve!

Related Reading:

Enjoy this incandescent treatise on the value of singledom by our fierce feminist friends at Out of Lines: Coupledom Compulsion

There are two ways (possibly three) of hanging toilet roll: the right way, and the wrong way (and possibly a third way): Rocking, Rolling, Ranting

On friendly Greek toilet attendants: Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts, But Totally Trust the Toilet Attendant

On the happiness attending the discovery of Greek public toilets, ancient and modern: Vacillating with Vespasian

This is not the first time we have reported on toilets that don't exist. One of our first efforts was To Be Or Not to Be - A Loo So Existential It Doesn't Even Exist

All posts featuring Feisty French Friend 

All posts featuring Jonny

 All posts featuring Shewee Fiend Friend

Pondering male nudity: Stark Raving Nudity 

Do check out the website of anti-porn campaigner and all-round heroine Gail Dines 
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