The Weight of a Talent

 You know when you're in a job interview and the cold, clammy hand of fear grips you as you realise you forgot - once again - to prepare a sane and reasonable answer to the question "What are your strengths and weaknesses?". You find yourself gaping, rather in the manner of a medium-sized cod, trout, or halibut, with a look on your face resembling that of Bertie Wooster realising he's got to marry - through no fault of his own - Honoria Glossop. This, as all civilised people agree, is a perverse and horrifying question, and asking it should absolutely be in the UN statues regulating crimes against humanity. Be that as it may - being moderately narcissistic, we tend not to focus on any flaws we might theoretically have here at the Privy Counsel, but swot up on our strengths whenever we get the chance. Such as they are. 

Having mostly misspent our youth and also our adult age, and being on track to largely squander our impending middle age, also, our talents might perhaps most honestly be described as "varied", "diverse", or "miscellaneous" rather than, say, "amazing" or "financially rewarding". However, one happy result of our having spent so much of our time writing a weird blog about toilets instead of, say, learning bookkeeping, crocheting street art, or networking with key players in the industry, is that we know a really good urinal when we see one. We don't remember ever consulting a career counsellor in our youth but if we had, now's the time we'd like to go back in time and triumphantly tell that smug adviser to their face that See? we know about urinals, so there. Anyway, Shewee Fiend Friend sent us these photos from a hotel in Canada:

We always find bars on the wall reassuring.

A beauty!

Yes, reader, that does read Twyfords Ltd., Hanley, England.

Our curt Canadian toilet photographer says:

I found a toilet for you

Actually the toilet itself is terrible

But the urinal was excellent

The hotel was founded 1926. The urinal could be from then?

But the rest of the bathroom is just old and grungy, not cute and antique at all

We shall of course be having a stern word with Shewee Fiend Friend about her use of the word "cute".

Meanwhile, Jonny - that splendid specimen of British manhood - has been to a Gordon Ramsay restaurant, causing us to ask ourselves whether Gordon Ramsay is the perfect representation of Orwell's Colonel Blimp? We have no idea, so instead here's a passage from "British Cookery":

 

When Voltaire made his often-quoted statement that the country of Britain has "a hundred religions and only one sauce", he was saying something which was untrue and which is equally untrue today, but which might still be echoed in good faith by a foreign visitor who made only a brief stay and drew his impressions from hotels and restaurants. For the first thing to be noticed about British cookery is that it is best studied in private houses, and more particularly in the homes of the middle-class and working-class masses who have not become Europeanised in their tastes. Cheap restaurants in Britain are almost invariably bad, while in expensive restaurants the cookery is almost always French, or imitation French. In the kind of food eaten, and even in the hours at which meals are taken and the names by which they are called, there is a definite cultural division between the upper-class minority and the big mass who have preserved the habits of their ancestors.

 

We're not sure what relevance this quote has, if any, for the below pictures but there's a time for quoting Orwell and that time is all the time.

"Nice urinal cake!", we commented. "I didn't sample it myself," quipped Jonny, laconically. "I stuck to the menu items."

This looks hygienic and well lit.

Yes, it's a Crapper crapper.

Here we go again with the cattle troughs.

Finally, here's a hot photo of Jonny and some air dryers.

Also, an important announcement: A friend of ours who recently visited Greece, and lived to tell the tale, brought us back an amusing soap called "Venus Secrets", which purports to contain ass's milk. Yes! Ass's milk! As a result of performing our ablutions with this miraculous beauty product, we expect to soon (the packaging doesn't specify a time frame, but reasonably within three to four weeks, surely?) be wielding the fascination of a Cleopatra and - who knows? - engaging in some festive naval battles and maybe destabilising an empire. Watch this space.

For our Festive Video we were naturally going to use Morrissey's Boy Racer ("He thinks he's got the whole world in his hands / Stood at the urinal / He thinks he's got the whole world in his hands / And I'm gonna kill him"), but Shewee Fiend Friend recently had an experience with this song and thought it had a profound significance in terms of the human condition, Weltschmerz, etc. 

Festive Video: Miley Cyrus, Used to Be Young

Related Reading

All posts featuring Shewee Fiend Friend

 That time  Intellectual Friend used the word "cute" and we had conniptions

All posts featuring Jonny

All posts featuring sinks looking like cattle troughs

 All posts featuring Canada