The Secret to Happiness: Double Toilet Roll, Flowers, and A White Tiled Floor.

We tend not to read a lot of challenging literature here at the Privy Counsel, having come to the comfortable conclusion that we know what we like, and we like what we know. Why bother reading anything other than P G Wodehouse, if the result is that you end up depressed and horrified? Well, quite. 

Depression and horror, of course, are part of life whether you like it or not. We endured, for example, a seminar recently where talking about one's personal life was encouraged, and people took this as a signal to start sharing information about their cats. As you may imagine, it took quite a lot of wine and ranting to get over this particular trauma, and we're not entirely sure that we ever fully will. There are, however, techniques for facilitating relative sanity. 

The trick, or so the evolutionary psychologists tell us, is to not focus on the horror. The human brain is engineered to anticipate danger, preferably seeing it everywhere, not excluding that other seminar you nearly had to go to, about sustainability. By making you permanently anxious your brain is, to put it crudely, promoting its own survival by ensuring that you don't forget to worry about snakes, bears, and whether the acquaintance you just made is likely to send you pictures of lasagna in the future. This is all fine. The problems emerge when life becomes so safe that, although there is no lack of sociopaths who will insist on talking at length about their grey cat Jasper and their brown cat Molly and these animals' respective feeding habits and individual peculiarities, there are very few actual life-threatening dangers, like snakes and bears, around. The brain, however, doesn't know the difference between grizzly-bears and cat-fanciers, responding with reasonable horror and panic when confronted with either phenomenon, and ensuring that you dwell on the memory, thus continuing your state of panic. The most effective measure against this constant state of angst is to focus on whatever good things happen to float by, in the polluted mess of a river we call life. Let go of the metaphorical mangled bike tyre, and grasp for the attractively weathered and potentially useful piece of flotsam wood.

There are many different methods for focusing on the good stuff and trying to forget about that weird photo of layered pasta. Some people meditate, others, for reasons unfathomable to us, knit things. Personally, our preferred method of dropping ice-cubes down the vest of fear is to open a bottle of wine and let nature take its course. Whatever you do, do not read modern literature.

Jonny, that splendid piece of manhood, is a philosopher in the true sense of the word: a lover of wisdom. Not for Jonny the convoluted conversations about whether Foucault's fuck-ups in the realm of historical accuracy mean that he can be discarded as a credible academic (yes), or the anguished political contortions on the subject of interest-rates (nobody understands this; let it go). Jonny went to a restaurant in Leeds, and it was nice. This hunky sage writes:

Chaophraya, Thai restaurant in Leeds.

Double toilet roll. Ample.

Flowers. Lovely.

White tiled floor. Nice.

Even a place as nice as this is not immune to graffiti though it seems.

Reader, there you have it. Go to a nice restaurant. (Take photos, if you want. Maybe send them to us.) Have some wine. Spend time with people whose company you enjoy. Develop the skill of telling complicated but plausible-sounding lies to get out of having to hang out with people who are prone to talking about cats, or sending photos of lasagna. Chill the fuck out. Personally, we're off to drink vast quantities of champagne. Vale!

 

Festive Video: Whitney Rose, Chivalry Is Dead

Related Reading:

All posts featuring Jonny

All posts featuring man's pragmatic everyday struggle for survival in this perilous world

All posts featuring graffiti

Some posts featuring restaurants

All posts featuring Thailand

Springing a Leak

It seems improbable, at the arse end of February, that you will ever see sunlight again, or do anything more constructive than sit wrapped up in your duvet, rocking back and forth and eating cheese. The memories of last summer's carefree, open-air gin consumption seem like a dream at best, or at worst a cruel and sadistic joke by our robot overlords who may well be amusing themselves by implanting false memories into what passes for our brain these days - we can't prove that they're not. Still, the world keeps turning round the sun and soon enough the birds are tooting in the shrubberies and various species of wildlife are doing unspeakable things to each other in the grounds and messuages. Spring is here, and there are signs of life from various corners of the world. Semi-Intellectual Friend, for instance, sprang this stark and surprising message on us:

Holy shit. I assume the internet is all over sending you stuff like this but biiiiig feature on hand towels vs dryers in the Guardian today:  

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/25/hand-dryers-paper-towels-hygiene-dyson-airblade

[...]

Also noticed a link to an older story about bowel movements near the bottom (fnar) of the page:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/nov/30/bowel-movement-change-the-way-you-poo-squatty-potty-toilet

Is the Guardian trying to make a move on Privy Counsel? Maybe you could sell out and make your millions.

Regarding the hand-dryer-versus-paper-towels issue, there are good arguments on both sides. We reckon it's one of those things where you just have to pick a side, and stick to it, belligerently. We've made our views on air dryers known, and will most likely maintain our opinion, even if presented with evidence that we are wrong, until old age and senility make the matter moot. Be advised that we are prepared to defend our viewpoint in a bout of bare-knuckle fighting. Bring your own gin.

When it comes to bowel movements and the worry that sitting on a toilet is "unnatural" compared to the "natural" method of squatting on the ground, we think it's mostly Brits who agonise about this. Possibly also Germans. (More research is possibly needed on which nationalities, exactly, are afflicted by this particular anxiety.) Personally we are very fond of the allaturca or squat toilet, but we by no means feel the need to purchase the "wildly popular seven-inch-high plastic stool, designed by a devout Mormon and her son, which curves around the base of your loo".

Is the Guardian trying to make a move on the Privy Counsel? What a fascinating question. What do our readers think? Feel free to drop us a fan letter in the form of a five-paragraph essay, either arguing for or against, or discussing the different viewpoints. Don't forget to summarise your views in a neat conclusion.

On avance. We're sorry to inform you that we've had another disagreement with Shewee Fiend Friend. Though most of the time we are as two giant brains pulsating as one, sometimes we have different opinions about things. Last time we counted, we came to the conclusion that we disagree on a total of nine things. (We're fucked if we can remember what those nine things are, but remember our terror when we realised that the powerful magical number nine was involved. We're not free of superstition at the Privy Counsel, however intellectual we purport to be.) Our latest clash was regarding the toilet doors at Vancouver Airport. Shewee Fiend Friend thought they were great, we thought not. We shall present you with the evidence, so that you can form your own opinion and stick to it, belligerently.

Possibly an entirely inoffensive toilet. We can't quite tell from this photo. The tiles are nice, though.

If you enjoy almost seeing people, here's your chance to go hog wild!

We do like the fact that these doors look like they lead into a Wild West saloon, but why do people insist on designing toilet doors that don't go all the way down to the ground? Our guess is, a man did this.

We can't fault these hooks. They're fucking excellent hooks.

The conversation went as follows:

Shewee Fiend Friend:
Vancouver airport loo is swank

Privy Counsellor:
They are very good hooks
I shall make a note of this.
Thank you for sharing the picture of the excellent hooks

[...]

PC:
Swanky, but don't go all the way up to the ceiling or all the way down to the floor
#fail #YouHadOneJob
Nice and bright, but why do they do that horrible material in the sinks that looks like grubby cement

SFF:
It's sparkly [the Privy Counsellor]
I love it
Sigh
So critical
The doors were super nice 
They looked all woodsy/cabiny

PC:
Yes but they're not noise-insulating

And that's the end of that fascinating academic debate, because at this point we went on to discuss something completely different.

Finally, we've got a build-up of enticing pictures of Jonny that we should publish before there's a blockage.

The first picture comes with this comment:

I did an art piece
It’s dark tho
Viewer discretion advised
It’s called Beauty and the Beast
The [non-] mixer taps are the beast and it think it’s obvious who the beauty is

We couldn't agree more! Woof!

The next set of pictures is summarised by these words:

Somewhere in London
Too drunk to take note where
There was a dog in the bar too so extra points

Feeling single, seeing double?

Well, this is a very nice sink, good tap, and unobjectionable hand soap. Why do people insist on making counters out of wood, though? There is a reason why the traditional materials are porcelain or stainless steel - they're easy to clean and FUCKING HYGIENIC. Wood absorbs water, making for a germ-friendly environment and has plenty of crevices for bacteria to fester in.

JONNY TOILET SELFIE WOOF!

We can't tell if we approve of this saloon-style door or not, as it lacks context.

The graffiti comment says, "We evolved to walk upright and use cutlery".

Actually, now we check our archive, we discover that there is a metric fuck-ton of toilet selfies from Jonny that we have forgotten about, due to the horror, trauma and gin consumption of recent times. We don't wish to overwhelm you with wonder and awe, so we'll save those ones for whenever we next find ourselves inspired by the gin fairy.

Let us finish with a festive video. We enjoyed, when in Budapest recently, a very nice and intellectual lunch with Lithuanian Friend and her intellectual colleagues. One of them sends his regards to the Privy Counsel's readers, and a video! It relates to our musings on the German toilet shelf, which is apparently rife in the Hungarian capital, and about which we poured forth appalled comments at some length in our post about that city. We're not sure we agree with any of the points made in the video, but it might potentially be considered an amusing political commentary. Apparently, the above-mentioned intellectual colleague says to keep in mind that the drawings are not correct.

Festive Video: Hermeneutics of toilets by Slavoj Žižek


Related Reading

Some other times when we enthused about the arrival of spring:
Cracking Some Suds in Kreuzberg

In Which We Express Our Gratitude to Electricians Springing into Action

All posts featuring Semi-Intellectual Friend 

Our opinion on air dryers:
AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH AIR DRYERS 

All posts featuring the allaturca toilet 

A blog post on the wonderful things that happen when men don't design fucking everything:
Caitlin Moran Really Does Make Everything Better

According to this post, we described the horror of recent times "with plenty of poetic expression but not a whisper of a scintilla of an iota of hyperbole", in this post:
Hungary: Dubious Shelf-Life

All posts featuring Shewee Fiend Friend

All posts featuring airports

All posts featuring Jonny
For the benefit of all the hipsters out there whose aesthetic and hygienic ideal is a 19th-century farm yard, we hereby remind our readers of the existence of the
CHOLERA BABE PARADE

Also another post featuring cholera

Also a toilet letter from the 19th century reminding us of the lack of public facilities, and wide variety of hygiene-related horrors that people endured until very recently

Another post in which we despair at the  possible conspiracy by hipsters to make everything look like 19th-century farm equipment:
Stockholm Central Station: The Trauma Is So Great We Are Brought To Quoting Cicero
 
All posts featuring Lithuanian Friend

Our Heart's Desire: For Nazis to Fuck Off, and for There to Be More Signed Pictures of Jonny

It is with unbridled joy that we prepare to present to you the winner of our New Year's competition! As all regular readers are aware, the competition was instigated by Jonny, and the prize is a signed photograph of that winsome young whippersnapper! All you had to do to enter was send in a photo of toilet graffiti.

The rules of the competition, announced in early November, were very simple:

1) Send pictures of toilet graffiti
2) Win a signed picture of Jonny
3) Live happily forever after, having gained your heart's desire

It is our rampant, unbridled pleasure to announce the winner of the Toilet Graffiti competition to be:

Drumroll...

LITHUANIAN FRIEND!

Lithuanian friend writes:

I had a spontaneous vacation in Gran Canaria and also remembered you, trying to find any good toilet graffiti. However, seems that there could be a campaign encouraging women to do more of that. I found only one in central station in Las Palmas. We should all remember that :)

THE WINNING CONTRIBUTION!
Transcription of the toilet graffiti:
"Don't forget I am learning to live." Quite philosophical, no?

Apparently, toilet graffiti is not as rampant as it once was. We remember seeing plenty of it in our youth, but for whatever reason, we rarely come across any these days. Whether this is because our social milieu has changed, from one fairly frequently incorporating dirty South London basements, to one radically more sedate (and clean), or because the advent of the digital revolution means that nobody carries pens with which to scrawl rude messages on toilet walls (as is the theory of our remarkably perceptive aunt) any more, remains to be determined (again, what are the social historians out there doing?).

Be that as it may, we hereby offer our wildest congratulations to Lithuanian Friend, who will be getting a signed copy of the below photograph in the post, and can thereafter get on with living happily ever after, having gained her heart's desire!

This is where we pass out from excitement, but not before uttering a strangled shout of HUBBA HUBBA!

We must not forget to view pictures from various toilets. Let us start with those at Heathrow Airport, shall we?

Traditionally, the first impressions to greet one on arriving at any British airport is the smell of air freshener and the sight of ancient wall-to-wall carpet that has been mended using duct tape. The newly spruced-up Heathrow Airport no longer sports carpets. The smell, however, is the same - indeed worse, if one travels round Christmas: a particularly revolting would-be cinnamon scent is sprayed with terrifying vigour in the toilets, while horrendously earnest Christmas music is channelled throughout the entire amenities. Ameliorating circumstances include the fact that the handwashing facilities are clean and feature a particularly soothing combination of hand sanitiser and hand lotion. Also, the taps are nice.

Wherein lies the difficulty of making toilet doors that go all the way down to the floor and all the way up to the ceiling? Wherein? Huh?

Look how many bags we managed to fit onto this admirably sturdy coat hook! Nothing had to be placed on the floor, and there was much joy.

We may have wandered into the disabled cubicle, which is why there is so much room. Also, a hygienically covered toilet roll holder, and a festive sign saying "Toilet duct access door"! Hurrah!

On the off-chance that you have the energy to view more pictures of toilets, have some from the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherd's Bush:

A TRULY EXEMPLARY DOOR! Note how there is a sturdy lock, no fewer than two sturdy coat hooks, and a helpful bar for those who have issues with mobility. And also, THE DOOR GOES ALL THE WAY DOWN TO THE FLOOR AND ALL THE WAY UP TO THE CEILING!

The bin is overflowing, but to be fair, there was a cleaner arriving just as we were leaving. Also, the toilet roll is hygienically covered. Hurrah!
Let us by all means take a moment here to appreciate cleaners, who are often underpaid and undervalued. Perhaps ask yourself what would happen if the person who cleans the toilets at your office or local shopping centre went on strike? Well, quite.

We are going to end this blog post on a serious note. The Heathrow Airport toilets may have constituted a near-insurmountable olfactory challenge (why make air freshener that tries - and fails - to smell like something nice? Why?), but we still believe that travel is essential in order to promote international friendships, spread understanding, and combat hate and unfriendliness. (And also, crucially, to be able to drink with friends in different time zones.)

Nazis marched in our town yesterday. Or at any rate people who called themselves Nazis - unless they were those Zombie Nazis hiding behind Norwegian ski huts, we doubt they were actual, literal Nazis. Be that as it may, everything is absolutely fine, as long as they march right out again.

We spent all of last year ranting about how "2017 is the year when a shitstorm of racism, sexism, and every kind of -ism you can think of, including nazism, will be unleashed upon the world", and making our thoughts on Nazis very, very clear.

Whatever happens, we will be maintaining this bog blog, made possible thanks to an international community of intellectuals.

To that end, we have chosen today's Festive Video with the view of not pissing off Shewee Fiend Friend, who really, really despises our taste in music. Also, isn't it funny how anti-fascist punk rock from the height of the Cold War era is relevant again? Just saying.

Festive Video: Asta Kask, Oss hjältar emellan
(View the lyrics, if you so desire, here.)

Ach fuck it, let's have one last picture. Here's what we hope 2018 will contain: mixer taps, festive haircuts, and electric sockets. Happy new year!

Happy new year from your Privy Counsellor, steering you enthusiastically, though perhaps not always coherently, through a murky universe since 2010!

Related Reading

All posts featuring graffiti

Funnily enough, we felt the need for '80s Swedish punk rock at this time last year, too:
Rampant Murderous Nazis Are Taking Over the World, But Here Is a Picture of Jonny In a Toilet, for Your Convenience and Comfort

Our thoughts on Nazis:
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu

Another post featuring ranting about Nazis, and a fancy shopping centre:  
"God Jul" from Gothenburg!

All posts featuring Jonny

All posts featuring Lithuanian Friend

New Year's Eve 2017: "A Truly Awful Toilet"

Last New Year's Eve, we were incandescent with rage. This year, we are still angry, but are too exhausted to work up any proper fury, preferring instead to recline on our chaise-longue with a drink or four in our hand, feebly waving our hunting crop in the air and muttering "Tally-ho" into the darkness. 

We still think, however, that people should complain less and do more.

Which leads us to our next point. We have been of the opinion, for a long time, that PEOPLE SHOULD FUCK OFF MORE. We stand by this.

We'd better move on to today's toilet pictures before our grumpiness goes supernova and someone ends up injured.

Jonny, that handsome young scallywag, says:

Christmas treat
A truly awful toilet
2/10

ARGH NO THE BLURRINESS WE CANNOT DISCERN JONNY'S CHISELLED FEATURES

The stains on the floor aren't even the worst thing about this toilet.

The picture quality is execrable, but the sign says "Out of order". Philosophical!

Jonny managed to find that elusive thing: toilet graffiti!
"Communism will win."
"Yeah, right!"
Personally we are not in favour of any ideology that is responsible for the deaths of millions of people, and are rather prone to agreeing with the "Yeah right" retort.

Unable to understand why this toilet, which is, to all appearances, tremendously shit, was awarded two whole points, we posed the question to Jonny, who replied:

Oh, lol
It had a nice mirror
And a coat hook

We move swiftly from the wet, slippery floor of whatever pub Jonny spent Christmas Eve in, and hurry towards the rarefied air of Kulturen, a museum in Lund, Sweden. We located these toilets on the first floor, and found them immensely encouraging.

Mixer tap, nice soap, paper towels (recycled), bin - SCHWING!

All present and correct: the toilet roll is hygienically covered

HUNKA HUNKA COAT HOOK! Also, the door is sturdy and goes all the way down to the floor and all the way up to the ceiling. (That odd noise was a huge sigh of contentment erupting from our chest cavity.)

Let us review some of the highlights from 2017, shall we? The year started off with the Women's March in January. There was a fuckload of resistance:

Rampant Murderous Nazis Are Taking Over the World, But Here Is a Picture of Jonny In a Toilet, for Your Convenience and Comfort

 

 

In March we concluded that rampant murderous Nazis were STILL in charge, and exhorted everyone to stop being a dick:

No Man (Or Woman) Is an Island 

 

 In April, we went to York. The title rather says it all:

Castles in the Air: Dreaming of Better Plumbing, or, Bitches Love Pemberleys, or, Bottling Up of Incomprehension and Rage

 

Luckily, pictures of Jonny appeared regularly throughout the year, for instance in June:

Feeling Single, Seeing 1.5: In Which Things Are Insanely Bleak, But Luckily There Are Pictures of Jonny

 

We ranted, of course, about Brexit, and the NHS, which made everyone very tired. Thankfully, there were pictures of Shewee Fiend Friend loading a cannon:

Nothing Is Certain But Death, Taxes, and Knees

 

We really did go on and on and on about politics. Luckily, there was also cake, and runes:

If You Are a Medievalist in Your Mid- to Late Thirties, and/or Want to Save the World, This Is for You

 

In July, we went to York - again! - and a feud between Jonny and Shewee Fiend Friend, based on pictures of cannon, almost developed:

In Which the Privy Counsel Goes Ballistic

 

In August, we indulged in nostalgia, stating that,

We would hate to be the age we were during the nineties again, and are supremely grateful for our current level of comparative maturity and relative wisdom, but some nineties phenomena, like the widely held stance that Hitler was insane and that a murderous government propagating a gibberish racist doctrine was about as welcome as herpes, are prone to make us feel ever so slightly maudlin after the third gin and tonic.

 Ah.

À la Recherche du Temps Perdu

 

In September, we enjoyed some exciting toilet pictures from Lithuanian Friend, and lamented the lack of public toilets for women:

Piss-Poor Performance

 

And also reiterated the need for female-only spaces in a deeply sexist world which is extremely dangerous to women:

"Let Them Eat Cake" - Could It Be Any More Obvious That a Man Designed These Toilets?

 

Several people claimed to enjoy our Halloween special in October, which says more about them than about us:

Halloween Special: The Mystery of the Sticky Spot on the Floor, or, The Telltale Splash, or, Scared Shitless!

 

We succumbed to philosophy in November:

What a Thing Is and What It Is Not Are Identical In Form. Or So We've Been Told.

 

Argh, we find ourselves overwhelmed by retrospection. Let us finish rather hurriedly with some wise words we wrote in 2016:

Remember that ultimately, everything you do is futile. The universe is a vast and terrifying void, containing one tiny speck of dust to which we are clinging, and ultimately destroying. We are, essentially, short-sighted monkeys with computers. Now relax, and stop giving a fuck. Have a drink, maybe.

On that note, let's have a Festive Video. As everyone knows, both women and men experience a perceived female dominance when women contribute 30-40 % of any conversation or discussion. Hence, women tend to be silenced before they've even taken up half the speaking space. Let's hear some women, shall we?

Festive video: Song Suffragettes, cover of Keith Urban's Female

Happy new year!

Related Reading

All posts featuring New Year's Eve
Last year's New Year's Eve rant: 2016 in Summary: Holding on to Hope, or, We're Really Cunting Angry, or, Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!

At Your Service

You know that feeling when - never mind not knowing where you're going - you don't even know where you are at the moment? Don't worry, we've been feeling like that most of the time lately. We're not entirely sure how to get back on the main road when your metaphorical car is a banged-up Peugeot that keeps returning to the same pissoir in a desolate village in the arse-end of rural France, though research suggests that self-medication incorporating lots of very small glasses of wine and obsessive use of the Calming manatee website may provide relief.

It is important, also, to not be alone with your crazed and derailed thoughts. One method that works really well for us is sending angry messages with links to articles about things that we don't agree with to Shewee Fiend Friend, neglecting to take the 8-hour time difference between ourselves and this stoic but sleep-deprived academic into account.

Rest assured that if, like us, you haven't the faintest idea where you are, you are not alone. Jonny, too, could use some directions. That strapping young toilet photographer sent us the following missive:

Toilet review

Found this gem on the way to Kent yesterday

Stall height. Quite low.

Unacceptable stall height

No seat and strange duct tape modification on the toilet roll (presumably to stop people stealing them).

At least they had a toilet brush

Frankly, in this case, we don't find the presence of a toilet brush at all reassuring.

Not a very good locking system, no coat hook and some graffiti

Ugh.

Space age style taps with blue and red respective buttons

Probably filtered straight from the urinal

Overall 3/10

 

When asked whether he remembers the name of the establishment, Jonny, that agile young stripling, replied:

No...

Actually

Put Dartford Services

I'm 70% on that

Jonny is not the only one who has been to a service station and photographed the toilets, but forgotten where he was and what he was doing. One of our correspondents visited some highly satisfactory petrol station facilities in Sweden a little while ago, and sent the following photos:

A cheerful wall decoration and an entirely adequate coat hook still leave this contributor apparently unimpressed, or perhaps just frantically trying to work out where she is.

Mixer tap, soap and functioning paper-towel dispenser in all the right places: Woof!

The sign says "Se livet genom framrutan, inte genom backspegeln" (View life through the windscreen, not through the rearview mirror). That's probably good advice, if you can remember it.

We're not really in favour of people being in relationships (unless you're casting sheep's eyes at Jonny, in which case we say TALLY-HO GOOD WOMAN, GO FORTH AND REEL THIS HULKING YOUNG TOILET CONNOISSEUR IN), not only because single people make for incontestably better drinking partners, but because relationships distressingly often end in the production of offspring (our spirit animal is Mr Woodhouse in Jane Austen's Emma). That human children are surplus to requirement is painfully evident from the statistics showing that an estimated 5.5 million children worldwide are victims of human trafficking. Clearly people should hold off having children until we as a species have learned to value them for purposes other than sexual and economic slavery. (See also: Are women human?) 

A correspondent of ours shared this picture, and we couldn't agree more:

This tallies nicely with our motto PEOPLE SHOULD FUCK OFF MORE.

What we are ragingly, roaringly, sea-captain-in-a-hammock-guzzling-South-Seas-rum in favour of, though, is friendship. We've said it before, and we'll say it again: Our Privy Counsel friends are the dog's bollocks.

 Festive Video: Miranda Lambert, We Should Be Friends

 

 Related Reading

All posts featuring Shewee Fiend Friend

All posts featuring Jonny