You Only Live Once, And Sometimes Even That's Too Much

We are prone to vaguebooking at the Privy Counsel. We admit it. More than once (for instance here, here, and here), we have been guilty of unleashing a full-on vague-whinge, mournfully hinting that things are "a bit grim right now" but refusing to specify what ails us.

Well, guess what. Things really have been grim - so, so, so, so grim - lately. We would actually quite like to tell you just how grim. But, this being a blog devoted to a) toilets and b) rampant intellectualism, we make a point of not boring our readers with tedious details about our personal life (except of course in the case of Jonny, who is, by the way, still single). So instead, we are going to forget our troubles by enjoying a rant related to a toilet which one of our correspondents experienced at a feminist conference not too long ago.

Said feminist conference took place at a place called Malmö Live. For readers who don't regularly keep up with the goss from southern Scandiwegia, Malmö Live is an incredibly ugly conference centre in Malmö, Sweden, which cost staggering amounts of the taxpayers' money, and now constitutes a daily blot or haemorrhage on the Malmö skyline.

Right up until the moment when some edgy young architect decided to outdo Hieronymous Bosch in nightmarish visions, and went and designed this, it was literally impossible to imagine an uglier building than Malmö Live. It seems that Malmö politicians like to pretend that they live in Sydney, or downtown Miami, and thus encourage the erection of gut-punchingly ugly wannabe skyscrapers, to help maintain this illusion. Thus, the historic harbour area of Malmö is rapidly being clogged up by hideous constructions of glass, steel and brick. The brutalisation of this culturally significant area will no doubt be regretted by future generations, nauseated by the sheer hideousness of Malmö Live and surrounding areas, but by then it will of course be too late.

Nonetheless, though the outside of Malmö Live is so ugly it makes you want to rip out your eyes and throw them in a vat of acid, the inside isn't bad. The conference areas are actually rather stylish and pleasant, with ear-friendly acoustics, and the toilets could be a lot worse.

This coat-hook passes our rigorous quality standards, being sturdy
and able to support a stuffed-to-bursting bag on a wet day.

The sinks are rather small, but the mixer taps are beyond reproach, and the soap smells nice.

Normally, the only colour we hate more than orange is brown, but we don't mind these orange doors. In fact, we find them rather festive. 

This toilet-roll holder is also beyond reproach, though the toilet paper is bleached.

Our correspondent indulging in a fulsome toilet selfie.

When things get really bad, we at the Privy Counsel look at pictures of Caitlin Moran until things feel better. Today, we felt the need to watch actual videos. Here's one that we found really helpful. If you, too, are struggling, have a cup of tea and watch this soul-soothing interview.

Festive video - Caitlin Moran's Moranifesto

Related Reading

All posts featuring Caitlin Moran

When things get REALLY bad, we especially recommend this post, in which we describe the group hug we once enjoyed with CatMo:
Caitlin Moran Really Does Make Everything Better

All posts featuring Malmö

Two posts featuring the colour brown:

Jazzing Things Up in Oslo
Brownian Motion, or, Brownout, or, A Brown Study - Semi-Intellectual Friend's Shower

Wishing All Our Readers a Towering Great New Year!

Happy New Year!

We shall keep this brief, to give you all more time for drunken revelry and orgiastic carousing, and also because sickness and ill health plague us like syphilis plagues a Romantic poet. Actually we suffer a vast deal, and have done for some time - though of course with the greatest patience in the world, which is always the way with us, for we have, without exception, the sweetest temper anyone ever met with. People often tell their other girls they are nothing to us. 

Be that as it may, we want to get back to drinking vast quantities of tea and watching old episodes of Poirot.

We have a greeting from Dragon-Hunting Friend, who says:

Happy new year from the "loo with a view" (as the lift attendant called it) - floor 68 of the Shard!

We've had some quite worrying conversations recently with Australian Friend about the Shard, and thus find this sight a trifle uncomfortable. But we hope you enjoy it!

That is quite some toilet! And with a mixer tap, too!

We don't have any new year's resolutions, though we do have two mottoes for 2016. And we mean to stick to them. They are:

FEMINISM NEEDS TO BE MORE MILITANT

and

PEOPLE SHOULD FUCK OFF MORE

We don't have a hell of a lot else to say. We meant to do a review of the year's twelve best posts, like we did last year to great acclaim. But we have the kind of headache that feels like you drank a bottle of Bailey's all by yourself, except unfortunately we didn't, or at least not recently. Also only three people have voted in the poll which we announced in our last post, with the intention of defining the twelve best posts of 2015. Clearly our readers are even more depraved than we thought they were, and don't appreciate democracy, or bog blog polls.

So that's it. Happy fucking new year!

Today's festive video is Miranda Lambert at the Grammy awards, because it is our ambition to kick one tenth of the arse she does during the year to come.

Festive video - Miranda Lambert, Little Red Wagon (57th GRAMMYs)


Now fuck off.


Related Reading

All posts featuring New Year's Eve
Feast your eyes on another loo with a view here: All Mouth and No Trousers - Sichuan Food in Singapore

A Very Wet Blog Post

We trust that everyone has had their annual Christmas bath and is now comfortable, clean, and drunk.

Now that Christmas is to all intents and purposes over and done with in all sane and normal parts of the world, we can sit back and reflect on what we have learned. If your Christmas has been anything like ours, you have been worrying about people not washing their hands properly. Insufficient handwashing, as every educated person knows, leads to the spread of cholera, typhoid, and salmonella left, right and centre. Possibly even herpes!

(By no means do we want to make our readers paranoid, of course, or hector anyone. We just wish people would stop doing things like rinsing their hands briefly (what good do they imagine that does?), and bloody well wash properly. There is a range of entertaining and informative instructional videos out there: damn well watch them.)

We received an illuminating Christmas parable from Shewee Fiend Friend yesterday. Here it is, via Shewee Fiend Friend's phone:

Yesterday I went to a Christmas fair at an English major horse [we're pretty sure that's supposed to read manor house, but the typo is too amusing to correct]
Waiting for a toilet, I see and hear a boy say to his mom, I'm just not going to wash my hands
I'm standing one foot away from both of them
Mom says ok
I say ew
No effect
In their defence, these were the most irritating taps ever
The next conversation I overheard at same sink was a little girl who definitely did want to wash her hands
Anyway girl tries to use these taps

We have no idea what is going on here. Is Shewee Fiend Friend photographing someone else washing their hands? Or did she somehow photograph her own hands? Or did she persuade someone else to take a photo of her washing her hands? And in that case, who?

Whatever is going on here, one has to admire Shewee Fiend Friend's dedication.

They only stay on when you hold them, require a lot of pressure, and are either burning hot or freezing cold
So girl suggests to mom, mom holds the tap while girl washes hands, and then girl will hold the tap while mom washes her hands
And mom says to girl, we forget we're so spoiled with our nice mixer taps at home

What a simultaneously heartwarming and spine-chilling story!

And now for something completely different. As we all know, voting is a serious business. One must never accidentally vote for a political candidate who wants to limit women's reproductive rights, cut down on support for schools, or go bananas with fossil fuels. It is thus important, when voting, to stay sober and pay attention.
But here's some good news: we've got a thing you can vote on where it's an advantage to be drunk! So have some more whisky, have a look through all of this year's 60 (so far) posts, and vote for your favourite!

If you are viewing the web version of this blog, you can see all of 2015's posts listed under "Down the pan: Blog archive", below the labels (quite far down the page).

We have helpfully listed some alternatives, but do add your own favourite post!

CLICK HERE TO VOTE!

Shewee Fiend Friend says: Christmas dinner and breakfast and every meal sorted!

Now, if you should peradventure not have access to a thick history book with many rude stories, unlike Australian Friend, who just sent us an amusing quote about the pox from Peter Ackroyd's London, don't worry! THERE IS NO NEED TO DESPAIR. We've got some holiday reading for you!

Our mysteries are generally very popular, and are especially relatable at Christmas. Moreover, this one is simultaneously a cautionary tale about what happens when you don't wash your hands properly:

A Christmas Mystery: The Mysterious Case of the Curse at Crapper Castle; or; Put a Lid on It; or; No Shit, Sherlock

Then we have, of course, our classic Poirot mystery from 2011:

The Body in the Bathtub: A Poirot Mystery

Enjoy!

Now, time for a festive video! This one comes to us from German Friend, who is busy celebrating the holidays on a southern shore.

German Friend says:

And here is your Christmas present! I can't listen to it now, I would wake up dogs and people, but I'm sure it's good. The audio is, as far as I remember, an ode to shit or something played in a loop in the Hundertwasser toilets in the Hundertwasser Haus in Vienna. Recorded July 2015. I'm sorry about the sketchy information. It's Christmas Eve 7 am, I have a hangover (from the day before yesterday) and 8,000 errands to run before starting the celebrations.

(Remember, by the way, German Friend's hectic New Year's Eve the other year?)

Festive video: German Friend, Hundertwasser Loo

All we have to add is, woof!

Related Reading

Our most hectoring handwashing post ever:
Handwashing Extravaganza

By the way, this post is from 2015 and it's pretty good:
"Drunken Routs, in Which More Things Were Broken Than Heads and Furniture, Sister!"

This one was good too:

All Mouth and No Trousers - Sichuan Food in Singapore

This one wasn't bad, either:
Cheese and Worcester

By the way, here is a summary of our main rants about non-mixer taps. You're welcome:

A Note on Desperate Measures
Are You British? Does Tap Sanity Elude You?
Let's Get Medieval: King's Manor, York
Mixer Taps - The Great Controversy, or, When Will Britain Enter the 21st Century?, or, You Are Not Alone!
More Dark, Dark Horrors: An Outwardly Reputable Employer with a Dark and Filthy Secret
More Uzbek Toilets
Oh! the horror! SCREAMING BLOODY HORROR HALLOWEEN SPECIAL: The British Workplace
On the Eighth Day God Created Paratroopers, But He Forgot the Soap
Right Up Our Alley
Safety at Work

Five Fabulous (And Frightening) Years: The Story of the Privy Counsel

Our sincerest contrafibularities! We have no memory of what we were doing on the day (ranting, no doubt, and perhaps drinking rum - possibly at the same time), but the Privy Counsel turned five on 18 October!

Five years! If we had had cake to celebrate with, it would most likely have looked like this.

Things have been grim of late. So grim, in fact, that we have repeatedly felt the need to google pictures of syphilis symptoms, just to remind ourselves that there are things we don't suffer from (although one Privy Counsel member does in fact harbour a case of bona fide genital herpes - however, we intend to stay true to our promise to keep the identity of this person a secret to our dying day (said promise does not, obviously, prevent us from dropping tantalising hints solely for our own amusement)). There are some good ones, for instance, here (do a page search for "syphilis", then click on the links).

The marvellous thing, though, about having access to a loose collective of intellectuals, connected by social media, is that something wonderful is bound to turn up sooner or later.

This cake would also not be incongruous at the Privy Counsel.

Last night, for instance, we learned that Kick-Arse Suffragette Friend has an exciting new project on the go.

Also Australian Friend surpassed herself in rampant intellectualism and invented a new word! Quizzlement - you heard it here first! The definition of the adjective is as follows: "Quizzled. adj. The state of perplexed beguilement imposed by a person on her admirer, through an act of mischievous ambiguity."

Then we suddenly remembered that BLOODY HELL WE HAVE BEEN GOING FOR FIVE YEARS. Let us tell you the story of the origins of the Privy Counsel!

This totally appropriate cake just screams "THIS ONE! YES! LET'S HAVE IT!"

Once upon a time, there was a country full of crap plumbing. Let's call it "Britain". Said crap plumbing was the cause of a pretty much constant stream of grumbling, mumbling, and outright ranting. One night, in the pub, Enlightened Friend suggested that we stop ranting and start a blog, if only to spare our friends from having to constantly listen to us moaning and bitching. We thought the notion was an excellent one, and set to enthusiastically, publishing no less than three posts on the first day.

The first post was called, bravely, Mixer Taps - the Controversy, and was short but loquacious. It said, simply:

Most British people see no need for mixer taps, as when they do exist, they don't work anyway. The rest of the world disagrees. The controversy continues.

Huzzah - our very first image!

Blog post number two, sporting the witty title Toilet Paper - Puppy Love (setting the tone for our happy habit of punning in an unrestrained manner), discussed the insane British obsession with quilted toilet paper. This groundbreaking essay posed the question:

Where does the British obsession with soft toilet paper come from? Why does bog roll have to be quilted? (Of all things, why quilted?) Is it due to the humiliations suffered during the Second World War, when millions of Britons were forced to keep a stiff upper lip while wiping their bottoms with newspaper?

FUCK OFF, PUPPIES.

The third blog post on this auspicious date, The Victorians - An Edifying History Lesson, described the Victorians as "a barbaric people who delighted in such unhygienic and downright dangerous practices as sideburn cultivation, wall-to-wall carpet installation, and lace-curtain twitching". Needless to say, this is now the standard view of the Victorians in all respectable academic circles.

Victorian toilets - pretty, but violently unsound.

After these initial - one could even say probing - posts, we moved swiftly on to reviews of museum toilets, starting with the Yorkshire Museum. We remember lurking nervously with the huge, clunky and LOUD camera we used to carry around in those days, on a wet October day. 

Mission accomplished without us being reported to the police or even, surprisingly, being openly accused of being perverts, we continued with the Castle Museum, where we spotted what is possibly the most amusing sign in the entire universe; a sign that perfectly summarises the unbridled lunacy of British plumbing:  

This sign unfortunately doesn't exist anymore.
Believe us, we have been back to check.

Pretty soon we were reviewing places like the disabled toilet at the Centre for Medieval Studies in York, and it didn't take long before we achieved legendary status among the depraved, the socially awkward, and the intellectual (i.e. our friends, and maybe five other people who clearly need to get off the internet and get a life).

We noted happily that this was "a toilet fit for Medievalists".

And now we've been at it for five years!

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 opportunity of getting embarrassingly sentimental, weepy, and vapid, and expressing our heartfelt thanks to all our friends and comrades! Some of you have been with us from the start, some have joined along the way. Without the Privy Counsel Friends (and assorted cronies, hangers-on, and passive bystanders) sending us toilet photos, ranting with us, and dispatching emergency pictures of Elvis when times get tough, this bog blog really would not be possible.

Now, let's have a festive video before we embarrass ourselves further. We've had this one in a previous post, but really, can you ever get enough rum? Well, quite.

Festive video - Brothers Osborne, Rum

Hasta la vista!

Parisian Chicness, Disease Prevention, and Unrestrained Language Nerdery. Oh, and Some Dogging.

The weather is finally showing an inclination to stop being freakishly nice, and to behave in a way that causes us not to scowl suspiciously. 

Nothing works our paranoia into a frothy, lathery sweat like an uninterrupted series of nice days. What's this in aid of, then, we ask ourselves, peering moodily at the blue skies. This feeling of ease and well-being is usually a sign that things are about to go tits-up, we mumble, giving the merry sunshine the evil eye. This will never end well, we whisper gloomily, and mentally throw rocks at the provokingly perky songbirds. 

The great thing about shit weather is that it gives one licence to drink obscene amounts of tea and huddle in a dark room, without having that irritating feeling that one should be doing something healthy and productive outdoors, like taking one's heart and arteries for a brisk walk, or declaiming Shakespeare sonnets to orphans in a wooded glade, or gawping at knuckle-bitingly ugly pieces of sculpture at the local park, while placing bits of wood in strategic places to provide shelter for a near-extinct species of beetle. (Read about a similar feeling of sunshine-related angst here.)

When the skies are grey and one can practically hear the werewolves howling on the moors, one can quite legitimately give the world outside the finger, sit down with a large whisky, and concentrate on looking at pictures of Caitlin Moran, and sending toilet photos to one's local bog blog. Here's one that Feisty French Friend took recently at the Musée du Quai Branly, in Paris:

Nobody does chic like those pesky Parisians! We find ourselves emitting a rugged Woof! In fact, a woof might not be enough to express the strength of our feelings about this stylish and pleasant bog - we might need to resort to a lusty HOWL!

Other things that can occupy one on dark autumn days is observing linguistic intricacies on signs inside toilets, and giving in to heedless, reckless, unrestrained language nerdery. (Our unrestrained-nerdery juices got flowing to a quite staggering extent at the weekend, when we engaged in an epic tour of medieval churches with Tudor Friend, which may or may not have included semi-perverse ogling of medieval wall paintings and church-wall graffiti.) This sign, for instance, observed in a staff toilet in a school in Malmö, says:

Hygglo! Vinterkräksjukan är på väg! Det enda och bästa sättet att skydda sig [mot] smitt[a] är enkel[t][:] Tvätta händerna noga efter varje toalettbesök.

(Be a brick! Winter vomiting disease is on its way! The only, and the best, way to protect yourself from infection is simple: Wash your hands carefully after you've been to the toilet.)

Hygglo! Wash your damn hands!

The word "hygglo" denotes a person who is decent, hygglig. It is unfortunately not listed in the Bible of Swedish-language nerds, SAOB, being presumably a recent creation; probably a 20th-century one. (Work began on SAOB in 1898, and the editors are currently at the letter T. The comparisons to Rowan Atkinson's frenzied attempts to rewrite Dr Johnson's dictionary in Blackadder, agonising over the word aardvark while going quietly insane, are naturally numerous.) 

Hygglo, ending with an o, follows the same pattern as other descriptive nouns like fyllo (short for fyllerist, "drunk"), miffo (short for missfoster, "freak"), fetto ("fatso"), lyllo (short for lyckost, literally "lucky cheese", or, rather more prosaically, "lucky person"), favvo (short for favorit, "favourite") and - a favourite of ours - pretto (short for pretentiös, denoting a pretentious person). The state of being a hygglo is perhaps best translated as being a brick. Hygglo, in short, when spotted on a toilet sign, is the kind of word that causes your average language nerd to do a little handwashing jig and start whistling, then walk around in a suspiciously jaunty way for the rest of the afternoon.

Speaking of winter vomiting disease, we couldn't believe that all of the internet hadn't managed to come up with a winter vomiting disease meme, so we made one, just for you:

Someone had to.

You're welcome.

At the risk of changing the subject abruptly (no, no, it's ok - we mentioned Caitlin Moran at the beginning of the blog post, meaning this qualifies as a continuous theme, or leitmotif), we just wanted to share this picture of Caitlin Moran's column in last Saturday's Times Magazine. 

As CatMo points out, the Times puts its writers' words behind a paywall in order to ensure that plebs like us can't read them without paying, with the rather marvellous result that journalists continue to get paid and are able to produce quality work without starving to death in the gutter, or being replaced by robots. The picture is therefore quite grainy, and the words are not available in an online form. But if you have the patience, enlarge it on your screen and enjoy the sheer holy joy that is a newspaper column by Caitlin Moran. (Or, if you don't have the patience, join your local library, like Jonny just did, and enjoy all of CatMo's columns for free, while vigorously appreciating the tax-funded miracle that is a public (or indeed pubic) library.)

What men need to know about women: 1) We're scared of you, and 2) Fuck off.

Oh hell, we need a festive video. Here's one incorporating a new word that we learned while playing Cards against humanity with Tudor Friend and some of her excellent and highly festive cronies last weekend. We'd say dogging is an admirable activity for rainy days, wouldn't you?

Festive video - Fascinating Aïda, Dogging

Related Reading

All posts featuring Feisty French Friend

All posts featuring Caitlin Moran

That feeling when it's sunny out and everyone is enjoying themselves, and you wish it wasn't, and they weren't:

Det lille Apotek: Big Beers and Small Toilets in Everyone's Favourite Toilet Country

If you enjoy linguistic musings, get more here

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.

Privy Counsel Pin-Up: Jonny! (Try to Restrain Yourselves.)

Ugh. The universe is doing that thing again where it's dark, and there's rampant misogyny everywhere, and bad things are happening left, right, and centre. And then, to get its filthy, bigoted, depraved kicks, the universe goes and adds pericoronitis to the already severely fucked-up state of things. Pericoronitis, in case you were wondering, is roughly as much fun as being tied to a tractor and pulled through a muddy field.

However, we mustn't let things get to us, or they will have won. (Identity of "them" to be determined at some point in future when the painkillers have worn off, and the smell of decomposing skunk has lessened somewhat in severity.) So let's cheer everyone up by enjoying a Privy Counsel Pin-Up! If memory serves us right (and there's an extremely large likelihood that it doesn't), the last one we did was in December last year, when we engaged in shameless perving over James Purefoy.

Celebrities are all very well, but in actual fact, celebrity culture can feel cloying, and shallow. So we thought we'd be a bit innovative and use a totally ordinary dude as a Pin-Up! And who better than Jonny! Jonny, for those of you who don't know him yet, can often be observed lurking in the Hyde Park area of Leeds. He is an all-round lovely dude, if a bit disgusting at times. He's also got totally smashing biceps, as you can see, and has the good taste of frequently posing in public toilets. Jonny counts as a Privy Counsel Friend for administrative reasons.

Jonny: an all-round lovely dude, if a bit disgusting at times.

If that got you feeling romantic*, ladies, check out this picture that Tudor Friend sent us!

Tudor Friend says:
"I do not want to know why anyone thought this would be a good idea."

*We're not quite sure what Jonny's relationship status is at the moment, but he tends to be very popular with the kind of wanton females who frequent this blog. So, if the type of dude who poses in public toilets gets your blood up, GRAB HIM WHILE YOU CAN.

What with all the darkness, misogyny, etc., we really, really, really, really, really need a festive video. Then we're off to add more rum to our tea.

Festive video - Chuck Berry, Johnny B. Goode

Related Reading
Jonny's finest hour:
Jonny and a Public Toilet - A Treat for Single Ladies
Another festive contribution from Jonny:
The Comfort of the Familiar - Life, Jonny, and Everything
A totally disgusting contribution from Jonny:
What Goes Around, Comes Around

Other posts involving Jonny:

Taking a Gander at Greatness

Less Intellectualism, More Prurient Pictures

We Clutch Desperately at Straws and Try to Cheer Everyone Up with One of Jonny's Pictures

The Comfort of the Familiar - Life, Jonny, and Everything

As I dressed for dinner that night, I was conscious of an impending doom.
"Jeeves," I said, "have you ever pondered on Life?"
"From time to time, sir, in my leisure moments."
"Grim, isn't it, what?"
"Grim, sir?"
"I mean to say, the difference between things as they look and things as they are."

Nothing is certain except death and taxes.
You know that thing that happens sometimes, where you think you've hit your stride and everything is going to be alright, and then suddenly life turns up with its beefy buddies and punches you in the stomach until you throw up? It is at such times that one finds comfort in the familiar - the bottle, an intellectual toilet blog, or, in our case, pictures of Jonny's naked legs. For reasons we'd rather not go into, we've seen a lot of pictures of Jonny's legs over the years. So imagine our delight when this turned up in our inbox! 

Come hell or high water: British plumbing at its finest

Jonny says, in his truly inimitable style,

Typical English plumbing fix

Duct tape and a Tupperware lid

At least it's a mixer tub, huh?

Where did that bottle go?

Festive video: Ramblin' Jack Elliott, New Stranger Blues

Related Reading

Previous posts involving Jonny:

What Goes Around, Comes Around (warning: unappetising content)
Taking a Gander at Greatness
Jonny and a Public Toilet - A Treat for Single Ladies
Less Intellectualism, More Prurient Pictures!

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

(Don't) Aim for the Stars

As our regular readers are well aware, we receive a fair amount of correspondence here at the Counsel. In light of our recent musings on incontinence (see for instance Shewees Are a Girl's Best Friend, and In Which We Indulge in a Feminist Rant and, of Course, Incontinence), we thought we'd highlight an issue raised by Shewee Fiend Friend, who writes:

My roommate who pisses on the floor is pissing considerably less on the floor since I spoke to him. However, he has started regularly having this friend over who does not seem to even aim for the toilet. He creates small pools.

The "flatmate who pisses on the floor" is, of course, a common theme in urban lore. One wonders what these boys' mothers were up to during their formative years. Presumably they were too busy, to quote Caitlin Moran, "giving birth on the kitchen floor – biting down on a wooden spoon, so as not to disturb the men’s card game – before going back to quick-liming the dunny" to teach their sons to aim straight.
We thought long and hard about how to help Shewee Fiend Friend, who is one of the best ("brilliant, but unsound", to quote the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn) and shouldn't have to put up with his kind of bullshit but, short of rigging the wiring so as to electrocute anyone careless enough to create a puddle, we couldn't think of anything more constructive than the passive-aggressive note. The passive-aggressive note being, as all educated people know, a reliable staple in every dysfunctional household.

Here are some helpful passive-aggressive signs to aid the navigationally challenged:

Ever a concern at the Privy Counsel!
Image from thumbs2.ebaystatic.com

The man who inspired this note
would perhaps benefit from using a shewee?
Image from static.someecards.com

While urine is not only (usually) sterile but also a damn useful substance, 
one nonetheless sympathises with the woman who taped this passive-aggressive note to a bottle of bleach.
Image from i.imgur.com

What more mothers should be doing.
Image from static.someecards.com/

Can we get one of these displayed in every office on the planet?
Image from static.someecards.com

This is our personal favourite.
Image from flickr.com

Here is an old warhorse, which we have displayed before.
Image from images.justbathroomsigns.com

If you have advice for Shewee Fiend Friend, on how to train her flatmate and his friend to refrain from pissing on the floor, do please leave a comment, or email us at theprivycounsellor@gmail.com!

Related Reading

A Brief Guide to Public Toilets

We Aim to Please: Interactive Toilet Game

A Festive Update

Polite Notice

Shewees Are a Girl's Best Friend
Semi-Intellectual Friend offers a startling and weird solution to the problem of male incontinence: An Annoyingly Long, But Brilliantly Clever, Post, Including Beer, Shewees, and Some Other Stuff