Ketchup and Other Sauces, Real And Imaginary

We trust that all our readers are familiar with the ketchup effect, whereby a desired quantity of something fails to appear for a long time, only to overwhelm one in abundance when one least expects it. We won't go into tedious details of the various ways in which toilet pictures have landed in our archive. Let's just say that there is a scientific shit-ton of stuff.

We are writing this on a train, believe it or not, which is a lot less exciting than it sounds. There is for instance no whisky in our immediate vicinity. Nor are there balloons, or attractive film stars, or any of the other things one would expect to find on a train on which one is writing a post for a high-quality bog blog.

Those of you who follow us on social media will be aware that we suffered a terrible calamity the other week: we lost the wifi connection at Privy Counsel HQ for an entire week! Luckily it came back, but we have not quite recovered from the shock, and are still having to restrain ourselves from shaking our fists maniacally, and putting pencils up our nose.

Tudor Friend sent us a message saying:

To celebrate your return to wifi: have some toilet photos. I took them when I was at Kensington Palace for a lecture back in December.

And the last one, my favourite, the sign for the ladies'!

We actually received a postcard from Tudor Friend some time ago, which looked like this:

Kensington Palace with Victoria in all her glory, on her throne

The postcard read:

Dear favourite Privy Counsellor, 

I'm sat in the entry to Kensington, which smells beautifully of greenery and orange peels from holiday swag. As I cannot attach them to a postcard, photos must be sent later, but I've photographed the bogs here for you. 

Though Victoria's actual ass ne'er sat upon today's "thrones", one can still imagine bad plumbing, the stink of sewage and cholera (although the loos here are quite fiercely clean). On the down side - no hook for one's bag. But the bathrooms give you rooms, proper privacy, and they're big enough to swing the cat (right into the toilet bowl, where it belongs). And you know it's royal, because there is actual sanitizer available to clean the seat!!! 

Both the taps - MIXED!! - and soap are on sensors and require no touch. Victoria's home it may be - Victoria's era hygiene standards it is not!! Four and a half stars - down half a point for the hook and slight paint-shabbiness on the room doors. But the way they distinguish ladies' and gents' is pretty cute. 

 Woof! What a refreshing epistle! These toilets seem to reach a royal standard - though not quite the Privy Counsel standard, considering the lack of a coat hook.
And yes, Tudor Friend italicizes words when writing postcards - our friends are that awesome. (Read our thoughts on the word cute, by the way, here.)

Before we break to run a meat skewer through the annoying man opposite us speaking loudly on his phone, let us have a gander at this photo a friend sent us, featuring two of our favourite people in the entire world.

Why these people are allowed out unsupervised
is as much of a mystery to us as it is to you.

We've got a special festive video today, to celebrate our return to wifi and the imminent demise of men on trains with no appreciation of social codes regarding noise levels, or personal space: an Elvis cover featuring Pete Whitelock! Also known as Pistol Pete! A legend in York, and the world! 

Festive video - Pete Whitelock, One Night

Related Reading

Remember when Kate Middleton stayed in a hotel, that had a toilet?
All posts featuring Tudor Friend
All posts featuring cholera
The Cholera Babe Parade

More posts featuring experiences on trains:
Finally! An Italian Train!
Trains, Sweat, and Fears
Trainspotting

A Huge Rollercoaster of a Blog Post, Featuring Cesspools, Cholera, and Corpse Toilets - with a Gratuitous Picture of Sean Connery Thrown In!

We deal with many first-world problems at the Privy Counsel. For instance, we worry about not having the time or inclination to buy new socks; whether we are sufficiently well-informed about Hammurabi's law code; and the fact that Privy Counsel HQ is infested with horrible, cocky fruit-flies which REFUSE TO DIE.

Another delicious problem we have is that our friends send us too much wonderful material, and that we just don't have time to deal with it all. Sometimes we consider starting some kind of web shop to raise enough funds to employ a sub-editor. But most likely we'd end up blowing all the money on a booze-fuelled trip to Japan, to check out the toilets. Also we're too lazy.

This blog post is an attempt to catch up with all the material that's gathered in our dank, spider-web-bedecked archive. Braving the angry pheasants who live there, we tiptoed in and extracted the most recently crammed-in items of marvel and wonder. (As regular readers know, we imagine, no doubt for sane and normal reasons, our picture archive as a crypt out of The Monk.)

This is going to be quite a long blog post, and we don't have any pictures that fit in naturally here. To motivate you to keep reading till the end, here's a picture from the public domain, illustrating London tap water in the 19th century. (More on this further down. Keep reading.)

First of all, Tudor Friend sent us this picture of a pretty mosaic bog floor.

Then Tudor Friend informed us that Facebook's algorithms constantly put weird toilet-related articles her way, like for instance this one about how physicists create "urine black holes" to solve the splashback problem. Quite interesting reading, if you wear chinos and/or urinate a lot.

AND THEN. And then, and then, and then - Tudor Friend sent us a link to a blog post entitled Consider the putridarium! This eminent piece of writing is about corpse toilets in Italian church crypts! As in, yes, toilets for corpses! You can imagine our excitement when coming across sentences such as,

Obviously the post-Vatican II Kumbaya guitar mass never really caught on there,  

and, your eyeballs are pretty much guaranteed to stare into the empty sockets of a skull in any given church you walk into.

Woof! This is a blog after our own heart! We don't dare reproduce any of the pictures for fear of  mortuary-related reprisals, but we highly recommend checking out this highly festive collection of bloggage.

What's next on our list of awesomeness? Oh, yes! Jezebel's pictorial exposé of Victorian London's methods of dealing with shit is a goldmine of resplendent phrases. Essentially a summary of Lee Jackson's book Dirty Old London, Jezebel's pictorial takes you through every aspect of Victorian shit management: the leaking cesspools, the appalling water quality, the turds floating in the Thames, the cholera. The tone is set in the opening sentence:

Give or take a couple of grand town houses and ambitious parks, nineteenth-century London was essentially a giant shit-smeared refuse heap beer-battered in coal dust.

This picture is also from the public domain and was captioned, last time we used it, "Turns out he knew something, John Snow". We're still sniggering. Oh, and another funny pun we made, earlier today, was when we compared ourselves to a fictional Johnny Cash song called "Rabid Old Hag". Snort, snort.

We are thankful every day that we have access to clean water and functioning plumbing! When we started this blog, it was specifically to rant about crap plumbing, because Privy Counsel HQ was situated in the UK, where people seem have a hard time realising that the 19th century, like, ENDED. Now that we are more Scandiwegian-oriented, we have very little to complain about, plumbing-wise, and have taken to rant more about other things, like feminism. It appears that human rights is another area where people have a hard time realising that the 19th century ended and that we are, in fact, living in the 21st century now. It would be nice, we think, if everyone could at least step into the 20th century, both in terms of plumbing, and human rights.

We would like to take this moment to express our satisfaction with the latest Bond film, which we went to see with Our Mum, a rampant Bond fan, yesterday. Except for the moment of panic when Bond casually strolled into Monica Bellucci's house and snogged her against a mirror, in a way that we thought normalised sexual violence in a very dangerous way, we were pleased to note that Spectre was actually fairly enlightened in its take on gender equality. For instance, both the main female characters had actual, real, bodies and faces. And, like, jobs. This, we thought, was a nice break from the tradition of having Bond girls being mere ethereal wraiths, with boobs.
Also, we thought what a comforting feeling it was to see a Privy Counsel location, namely Courchevel altiport, featured in a Bond film. However, we were - unusually, for us - deluded. A Google search told us that Courchevel altiport wasn't in Spectre but in Tomorrow Never Dies. Whatever.

Here's a gratuitous picture of Sean Connery in the bath. The magnitude of Connery's trend-setting may be gathered from the fact that even Bishop Brennan emulated him. Image from mouchegallery.

So far so encouraging. May we just take moment, before we get to the Festive Video, to enjoy a photo of manspreading? We've ranted a fair amount about mansplaining on this blog, but haven't quite got around to manspreading yet. However, the other day someone reminded us of the existence of the Manspreading blog, and we thought this was a delightful illustration of this phenomenon:

We wouldn't want to speculate on how much time of our life we've spent pressing our knees, elbows and bags against our body to avoid taking up space that a man feels entitled to fill. Image from Mentakingup2muchspaceonthetrain.

Oh, and another thing that happened recently was we did a Google search to find out if there is a patron saint of plumbing, and THERE IS. His name is Vincent Ferrer.

Tea has been a popular topic of conversation at Privy Counsel HQ of late. Making tea is also an effective way of avoiding cholera, and other water-borne diseases. (Make sure you boil the water for at least one minute.)

Festive video - Kasey Musgraves, Cup of Tea

Related Reading

If you want to help other people avoid diseases caused by inadequate sanitation and plumbing, consider donating to Oxfam or WaterAid. Or, now that Christmas is looming, buy a festive Oxfam Unwrapped gift for a friend or loved one!

All posts featuring cholera

Specifically, the Cholera Babe Parade

Specifically about John Snow and cholera: Plumbing, Blessed Plumbing

A comical tale about cholera in the wild, wild West: A Rootin', Tootin' Toilet Tale

All posts featuring sewers

Specifically featuring sewers and medieval French

To read about what people got up to in York in the days of yore, check out The Historic Toilet Tour of York

York sanitation issues specific to the Viking Age: Jorvik: In Rude Health

More historic health hazards: Book Club: Cocoa and Corsets

The City Museum in Winchester: Circling the Drain

You know the feeling, right? You're trying to read an academic anthology, but the gaggle of lunatics who wrote it believe that making diagrams incorporating fourteen arrows pointing in different directions while haphazardly letting off terms like "a sense of not-knowing", "multi-voicedness", "experential", and even "warranted assertibilities", is a reasonable use of everyone's time.

That feeling, when the world looks like this, and you are having to restrain yourself from opening the window and flinging yourself onto the warranted assertibility of the very hard terrace below.

You yearn for a time when life was simpler. Like when you spent two days getting shitfaced in Winchester and taking crap photographs, for instance. Here are photos of some ace signs at the City Museum, Winchester.

Life in Winchester in the mid-1800s was basically one big Cholera Babe Parade.

Obsessive Emmerdale Fan Friend likes to explore complex intellectual concepts
using interpretive dance, if given half a chance. This option doesn't seem available in this case,
but efforts have been made, in the past, to analyse the tension in an exciting drama.

Topography is such a bitch.

Did we mention we love signs, especially cholera-related ones?

THIS IS WHERE IT GETS REALLY EXCITING.

LOOK! IT'S A MEDIEVAL LAVVY SEAT!

We think that's enough for now, don't you? Also we really need to finish that book. Let's have a festive video full of filth, medieval peasants, and anarcho-syndicalism.

Festive video - Constitutional Peasants, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Related Reading
Previous posts about Winchester:
Halloween Horror - Drunken Graffiti and Mindless Lurching in Winchester

Thomas Crapper Day Greetings from Winchester!

The Cholera Babe Parade: Woof! Cholera Babe Parade!
Our favourite guide to the city of Winchester will ever remain Shewee Fiend Friend
Sewers, gratitude, and John Snow: Plumbing, Blessed Plumbing
Read all about Thomas Garnier, fierce botanist and anti-muckabite, here.

There Is Too Much Going On. This Blog Post Will Probably Give You a Migraine.

Following the dramatic reduction in mansplaining levels after our recent rant*, we had intended to spend some time indulging in the kind of hardcore intellectual pursuits which we complained the other day that we were prevented from getting down to, due to being permanently pissed off, because of all the mansplaining. But, as is often the way, we received word of a most exciting cleanliness campaign in India, the festiveness levels of which caused us to yearn, ache and long for tending to our beloved blog.

In a drive called Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, efforts are being made to improve sanitation in India. As anyone who has ever inhaled the smell of sewage, coming from what is supposed to be a river, knows, this is a really, really, really good idea. According to one source,

A United Nations report in May said half of India's population still practises open defecation - putting them at risk of cholera, diarrhoea, dysentery, hepatitis A and typhoid. The resulting diseases and deaths cause major economic losses, and a World Bank report in 2006 estimated that India was losing 6.4 percent of GDP annually because of poor access to sanitation.

Another source tells us that "At least 30 lakh [Editor's comment: that is, if we remember rightly, three million] central government employees working across the country and hundreds of school and college students will take the pledge of cleanliness at different functions". If you've had a rough day and need cheering up, have a look at these pictures, from the Times of India, of said government employees doing just that! We're not sure what the brooms are supposed to accomplish, but you can't deny that any effort to improve sanitation in "the subcontinent" (as India is always, irritatingly, called whenever a journalist needs a synonym for "India" and can't think of one) is worthy of a massive HURRAH!

One Indian administrative officer has reportedly cleaned his office every day since 1993. Every day. Since 1993. You can imagine how clean it must be! This sign, outside his office, purportedly provides information on how often the dude cleans his office, and how long he has been doing it for.

*Said reduction in mansplaining could also be due to the fact that we have been too busy to actually talk to anyone.

We could have ended this blog post here, but why should we?  Remember Exuberant Archaeologist Friend's spirited account from Rome? Let's have more of that! (Also, we know that several of our friends are eager to improve their Scandiwegian, and we reckon this is a golden opportunity for them to brush up on their colloquial Swedish.)

Här är nästa skörd:

De första är från de kapitolinska museerna. Det saknades toalettring på ALLA toaletter. Fanns inga krokar, så det var tur att [min man] var med och kunde hålla grejerna. Tvålet var bra, luktade supergott. Det verkar som att de lagt alla pengar på väldoftande tvål istället för på toalettringar. Skabbigt deluxe.

(Here is the next crop: 

The first ones are from the Capitoline Museums. There were no seats on ANY of the toilets. There were no coat hooks, so it was lucky that [my husband] was there and could hold all my stuff. The soap was good; it smelled really nice. It seems they spent the entire budget on fragrant soap instead of toilet seats. Minging deluxe.)

We like these taps, but this kind of modern basin gives us the shivers:
surely it makes it really hard for the cleaners?

We usually reason, pragmatically, that a toilet that HAS NO FUCKING SEAT is actually more hygienic,
as the surface which can be dirtied is smaller.
It is still no pleasure having to use a toilet with NO FUCKING SEAT, though, obviously.

Oh, dear. A pipe disappearing into the wall?
We're stupendously glad that we won't be around when this set-up, inevitably, goes to shit and has to be repaired.

Nästa är från ett kafé vid Piazza Navona; Tre Scalini. Jämfört med alla andra toaletter i Rom så var detta ett högteknologiskt tempel. OCH DET FANNS EN RING!! Dessutom reste den sig automatiskt när man ställt sig upp och sprutade sedan ut sanitetsvätska på ringen**. Utmärkt. Tvålet luktade gott. Detta var den klart bästa toaletten.

Mer följer!

(The next set of pictures is from a café at the Piazza Navona, Tre Scalini. Compared to all the other toilets in Rome, this was a temple of high-tech. AND THERE WAS A SEAT!! Also, it was folded up automatically when you got up, and sanitiser was sprayed onto the seat**. Excellent. The soap smelled nice. This was totally the best toilet. 

There is more coming!)

**Because we weren't sure how this worked, we asked for clarification, and were given the following explanation:

Sanitetsvätskan sprutades lite snett uppåt så att det skulle typ falla ner på ringen när den rest sig. Vätskan kom från den delen av toaletten där spolknappen skulle ha suttit om det varit EN NORMAL TOALETT!

(The sanitiser was sprayed sideways upwards, in order to fall onto the seat when it had been folded up. The fluid came from the part of the toilet where the flush button would normally be, if it had been A NORMAL TOILET!)

The toilets in the Tre Scalini café in Rome: laudably hygienic!

WE LOVE TOILET SIGNAGE CLARITY

There is no hot water, but on the other hand there is no non-mixer tap insanity happening, either.

Another pipe in the wall.

These instructions are very, very clear.

We bloody love covered tissue!

Did the mention of the Piazza Navona set off a bell in our head? Did it ever? Bridget Jones is a label on this blog, after all, so here, for your reading pleasure, is an extract from The Edge of Reason (as in the book, obviously. The film, as every right-thinking person knows, doesn't count):

"Hello, Bridget, this is Colin Firth." We all jumped a foot backwards. It was Mr Darcy. The same posh, deep, can't-be-bothered voice that he proposed to Elizabeth Bennet in on the BBC. Bridget. Me. Mr Darcy said Bridget. On my answerphone.
"I gather you're coming to Rome to interview me on Monday," he went on. "I was calling to arrange somewhere to meet. There's a square called the Piazza Navona, sort of easy place to find in a taxi. I'll meet you about 4.30 by the fountain. Have a safe journey."
"1471, 1471," gabbled Jude, "1471, quick, quick. No, get the tape out, get the tape out!"
"Call him back," screamed Sharon like an SS torturer. "Call him back and ask him to meet you in the fountain. OhmyGod."
The phone had rung again, we stood there rigid, mouths open. Then Tom's voice boomed out, "Hello, you pretty little things, it's Mr Darcy here just calling to see if anyone could help me out of this wet shirt."

(Helen Fielding, The Edge of Reason. London: Picador, 1999, 159-160)

We reckon this is as good a time as any to revisit the wet-shirt-scene from Pride and Prejudice.

Festive video: Pride and Prejudice, wet-shirt-scene


Related Reading
A Mr Darcy Pin-Up: It Is Tolerable, We Suppose - A Privy Counsel Pick-Me-Up
And another one: Privy Counsel Pin-Up - Colin Firth
All previous Bridget Jones-related posts
All posts from India
All posts from Italy
Up in the Air - Introducing Exuberant Archaeologist Friend
More information on why sanitation is so important:
Good Deeds
Oxfam Build a Bog

Woof! Cholera Babe Parade!

It's no use struggling against the unavoidable: the Cholera Babe Parade has been conga-ing inexorably in our direction, and now it's here! It was bound to happen sooner or later, so we may as well bow to the inevitable and bid the Cholera Babes welcome as they thrust their way into our lives and take over everything.
Discerning readers may be scratching their heads, wondering what in the name of arse a Cholera Babe actually is. Put simply, it's a red-hot Victorian babe in the process of dying from cholera! The symptoms of cholera include, Wikipedia informs us,

[d]iarrhoea and vomiting of clear fluid. These symptoms usually start suddenly, half a day to five days after ingestion of the bacteria. The diarrhoea is frequently described as "rice water" in nature and may have a fishy odour. An untreated person with cholera may produce 10 to 20 litres of diarrhoea a day. Severe cholera kills about half of affected individuals. Estimates of the ratio of asymptomatic to symptomatic infections have ranged from 3 to 100. Cholera has been nicknamed the "blue death" because a person's skin may turn bluish-gray from extreme loss of fluids. 

If that's not sexy we're not worthy of gazing at pictures of be-cravatted Austen heroes!

Other symptoms of cholera include, as Unreasonably Attractive Friend noted, the sudden appearance of "a lower-cut dress".
Image from Wellcome Images.

Shewee Fiend Friend says:
"I like how she still does her hair. If I had cholera and was starting to look like a zombie,
I don't know that I would bother with making sure I had excellently coiffed hair."
Image from Berndt Tallerud's Skräckens tid: Farsoternas kulturhistoria (Stockholm: Prisma, 1999), p. 127.
Originally an etching by A. Gerardin, 1832, from H. Vogt's Das Bild des Kranken.

Woof! A (very attractive) friend of ours says,
"Haha, the first one looks familiar.... I believe I saw it in the bathroom mirror this morning".
Image from Wellcome Images.

Shewee Fiend Friend remarks, amusingly, "She didn't bother to do her hair I see. Standards are slipping".
Kick-Arse Suffragette Friend says, and we can only agree, "Them's some sexxy toes".
Image from Wellcome Images.

Shewee Fiend Friend continues her diverting quips, commenting,
"It looks like you're required to wear these hats if you're too dead to do your hair".
Image from Wellcome Images.

"A woman extravagantly equipped to deal with the cholera epidemic of 1832; 
satirizing the abundance of dubious advice on how to combat cholera."
Image from Wellcome Images.

"A mother looks askance at her daughter, whom she suspects of having contracted the cholera."
Image from Wellcome Images.

A French doctor delighted to have found a genuine cholera victim/babe.
Image from Wellcome Images.

The babe to out-babe all babes: Florence Nightingale! Here she is tending to cholera victims in the Crimea.
Image from Wellcome Images.

Dr Jekyll's vaporiser is effective against cholera, rheumatism and yellow fever.
Wouldn't surprise us if it was a hell of a hangover cure, as well.
Image from Wellcome Images.

London water - frequently the cause of cholera.
Image from Wellcome Images.

Turns out he knew something, John Snow.
7 September, 1854: Dr John Snow breaks the pump handle in Broad Street, to prevent the spread of cholera! HUBBA HUBBA!
Image from Wellcome Images.

Stay tuned for the Cholera Babe Pin-Up Calendar. (We meant to write a book about this in future, but it turns out someone already has.)


Other reasons a lady might turn black and blue:


Festive video: Jane Austen's Fight Club

Related Reading
More about John Snow and cholera: Plumbing, Blessed Plumbing
The Vikings had issues with clean water, too. Jorvik: In Rude Health
Help people get access to clean water: The Privy Counsel Helpfully Sort Out Christmas!
A comical tale about cholera in the wild, wild West: A Rootin', Tootin' Toilet Tale
More historic health hazards: Book Club: Cocoa and Corsets
Pestilence and Hygiene
Syphilis, Bathing, and Dentures. You know It Makes Sense