Whether You Want It Or Not: Super Summer Extravaganza!

It has been decreed by Privy Counsel headquarters that you deserve (the choice is yours whether to view this as benevolence or hostility) a super summer extravaganza blog post, and thus, whether you want it or not, and whether getting one is even in your best interests, you are getting a super summer extravaganza blog post! 

We have a lot of photos of toilets to get through, so we'd better get started before the leaves fall from the trees and the bears (those mythical creatures who, according to a popular idiom, crap in the woods) go to hibernate, the lucky fuckers, while the rest of us have to continue getting the bus to work in darkness while trying not to freeze our toes or other extremities off, spend the day under fluorescent lights engaged in meetings with people who can't form coherent sentences, then go home in the dark only to find that the cheese has gone mouldy and women STILL don't count as humans.

Let us keep the darkness, metaphorical as well as literal, at bay, however, by focusing on metaphorical (and, in the case of the northern latitudes, unremittingly literal at this time of year, actually) sunlight: We have a special treat for you today! Regular readers will remember with fondness and admiration past posts by Intellectual Friend. Well, hold on to your hats and make sure your toilet roll is turned the right way around - here is a new contribution from that worthy intellectual! From Greenland, no less!

I thought I would show you this private toilet, which I saw (and wincingly made use of) in a forlorn settlement called Oqaatsut, latitude 69 N, population 40 not counting a couple hundred sleddogs.

It is I believe the cosiest loo I have encountered so far in such a context (the context being the lack of running water, no sewage system (the skybound pipe behind the seat merely serving as a mildly efficient vent and stench suppressor) and the undiggability of the frozen ground).

Black plastic bag in the toilet bowl/barrel.
Suspicious yellow-tinted meltwater in the washbasin.

Helpful inscription on the wall above, "Uunga errorit", which can be interpreted as meaning "Wash here" (an injunction which I did not feel inclined to obey, especially as I had my hand sanitizer to hand), where -it is the imperative 2nd pers. sing. ending.
There was no toilet paper; but if there had been any, I'd assume by analogy with other lavatories in the country that the roll would be lying on a mouldy windowsill or on the actual and clammy floor at the very foot of the toilet. Note however the ingeniously placed wooden soapholder (what passed for soap in there looked however very unattractive) and also the purple hook and festive handknitted towel.

I should add that I failed to obtain prior permission to take this sneaky photo, partly because our host, a venerable lady and oldest dweller in said settlement, could only speak Greenlandic (and some thick dialect of it at that), so that technically it might be a case of rape and abuse of one's privacy and private property, such as it is, although I'm no expert.

But the brave old lady had cooked us lunch, bless her, and she sat and watched us eat it with great interest. [Name omitted], the only fluent speaker of Greenlandic among us, mostly declined to engage in conversation with the host, leaving the hyggelig/lagom atmosphere to thicken up to its natural slightly awkward density.

It was a more or less planned stop we had on a little sailing trip which we took out of Ilulissat, a town to the north where we spent Easter. And here for the sake of variation are a few other pics from that Oqaatsut settlement and around: the [...] house of our host [omitted due to privacy concerns], a bleak view of the village, the worthy old vessel in which we were sailed thereto, and an icefell or two.

We've seen a lot of primitive toilets in our day (for instance, this one or why not ponder this one or indeed this one), and Intellectual Friend's bog description does not scare us; being situated, as it is, in a context of rugged wilderness and base survival. Continuing the theme of rugged wilderness, but in a location which offers no excuse not to offer hygiene and comfort, let's have a look at the toilets at Tugg, a hipster burger place in Lund, Sweden, where we went one sunny day with Australian Friend.

You'd think that Lund, this eminent university town, would produce nothing but civilised functionality, but you'd be wrong. Our main critique of Tugg has heretofore centred on the fact that whoever designed this eatery decided to put metal chairs on a cement floor. Why people choose to make the surroundings in which people are supposed to eat actively unpleasant and potentially damaging to one's hearing is beyond us. Then we went to check out the loos and are subsequently also wondering why anyone would choose to make a toilet unnecessarily difficult to use, due to an inexplicable urge to pander to the 19th-century farmyard aesthetic. Let's show you what we mean.

Here is the toilet. Note the bare walls (nothing wrong with bare walls as such), the minimalist loo (again, nothing wrong with this for now), the weird and flimsy curtain stopping people outside from being able to look in, and the toilet rolls which, albeit plentiful, have worryingly been put into a rustic wooden box. It's not necessarily unhygienic but it's not exactly indicative of cleanliness either.

There are no paper towels; instead, brown (why brown? Why? Does anybody actually like the colour brown?) cloth towels have been placed in another rustic wooden box, this time placed reassuringly high up on the wall.

There are two bins; one for the brown (whyyyy?) towels, another for other waste. This is all fine.

 Now it's starting to get scary. The cistern for the toilet is an old-timey one on the wall, with a metal wire that needs to be pulled for flushing. Burlington is a Swedish brand with a nice-looking website that offers no information whatsoever about why one should use this type of cistern, whether it's in any way water-saving, or whether it's considered disability-friendly.

 The tap offers so many different types of horror that the breadth and width of the sum total of the horror is hard for the human intellect to comprehend. It's situated over a cattle-trough-like sink (why, in God's name, do hipsters keep insisting on sinks that look like they might be full of cow drool and half-chewed clumps of grass?) and is literally composed of a water-valve lever handle. It is very much not disability friendly, or indeed friendly to anyone who didn't grow up on a farm in the 19th century and has strong, calloused hands the size of dustbin lids, being very hard to turn. Also, the pipe offers only cold water. Not sure how this conforms to health and safety regulations, if at all. Note the toilet roll placed by the sink, on a wooden surface that is extremely likely to absorb water and breed bacteria, helpfully supplied by the hands touching the toilet roll.

In the manner of people who insist on serving you coffee in a glass, as if they are so far above material things that burn injuries are inconsequential (mugs have handles for a reason?), the architect behind this horror ensemble says, "I DON'T CARE ABOUT WHETHER YOU CAN WASH YOUR HANDS YOU DIRTY PEASANT ALSO STOP STARING AT ME AND GO CLEAN OUT THE OUTDOOR PRIVY NO I DON'T CARE THAT YOU ARE DYING FROM CHOLERA YOU SCURVY MALINGERER".

The door has an old-timey handle and no coat-hook.

The water pipe has a pressure gauge. Personally, we'd have preferred a sane and hygienic tap.

We're grateful that we were in such charming company, or bad things might have happened to our mental state. Swiftly moving on before anyone develops tuberculosis or gangrene of the soul, let's contemplate these interesting pictures from New York, described in Shewee Fiend Friend's characteristically terse staccato style.

Ok I'm in a weird speakeasy

They only have whiskey

And all vegan food

The bathrooms

Are beautiful

But

No paper towel or soap

Not sure how they're supposed to do that without soap
Our waiter left the bathroom before me
Also

 

 I knocked the toilet paper over

Afterwards we went to burp Castle

There are paintings of drunk monks everywhere
The toilet was disappointing

The toilet per se may be disappointing, but we see much entertainment value in the graffiti, for instance the "PODCASTS???" scrawl (we don't see the point in them either - why listen to people breathing weirdly into a microphone when you can get the information much quicker by reading?). Also we enjoy, as ever, almost seeing people.

We asked whether Burp Castle was a typo, but learned that it wasn't:

Nope that's what it's called

It's a monastery esque place

You're not allowed to speak above a whisper

 We suggested that you then "can't get drunk as there would be a great risk of laughing raucously?", and the following pithy exchange took place:

Shewee Fiend Friend: I guess? Unless you are good at getting drunk quietly
Privy Counsel: You might as well just inject yourself with melatonin and go quietly to sleep

 Jonny has been no slouch this summer, sending us many excellent contributions with messages which, readers of this long and pontificating post will be delighted to know, are short to the point of abruptness.

The conversation for this one went as follows:

Privy Counsellor: So many things going on. Care to make any comment?

Jonny: Not at this time.

Privy Counsellor: You have the right to remain silent.

According to the diploma this urinal is located at the Flying Duck in Ilkley, and has been twinned with another toilet somewhere.

Continuing the Ilkley theme, Jonny writes:

Nice toilets

Someone wee'd on the seat which is infuriating

But nice nonetheless

Hamiltons Cafe just out of Ilkley

This reminds us of that time when Shewee Fiend Friend's flatmate "created small pools".

This sink, thankfully, does not resemble a cattle-trough, though the taps are that worrying breed of subjunctive mixer taps.

Semi-Intellectual Friend has also been in touch, offering this commentary on our ongoing Jonny Babe Parade:

Johnny looks shit hot. Shit hotter every time I see him on there in fact. I reckon he's one of those Paul Rudd types that just grows increasingly into their own good looks.

Yes, we naturally asked Semi-Intellectual Friend's permission to share these words, and got the following response:

If you ever want to share my compliments about Jonny on the blog (or any mutual friend (that I've just not met yet)), totally go for it. He's got Hollywood magnetism and the world needs to know about it.

 
Finally, in a triumph of 19th-century farmyard romanticism, we offer this picture of Jonny, dressed as a cowboy, in front of a sink shaped like a cattle-trough.

WE HAVE ONLY ONE THING TO SAY AND THAT IS "GIDDY-UP!!!"

For today's Festive Video, let's have something that evokes the midnight sun and the hope of good plumbing, as well as offering a mild dose of 19th-century barnyard aestheticism (hopefully a mild dose may ensure a vaccinating effect, like cowpox).

Festive Video: Maxida Märak and Downhill Bluegrass Band, Nikesunnas Jojk

Related Reading

All posts featuring Intellectual Friend

On toilet roll orientation: Rocking, Rolling, Ranting 

A medieval lavvy seat: The City Museum in Winchester: Circling the Drain

Yet another medieval lavvy seat, the finding of which was reported in the Guardian, the link to which article was probably sent to us by Shewee Fiend Friend:
Helle's toilet: 12th-century three-person loo seat goes on display

All posts featuring sinks that look like cattle-troughs

All posts featuring Australian Friend

All posts featuring Sheewee Fiend Friend

All posts featuring Almost Seeing People

All posts featuring Jonny

On the difficulty, for some people, to aim: (Don't) Aim for the Stars 

A post in which we hold forth on the topic of subjunctive mixer taps: The Hirschsprung Museum, or, Revising the Status of Denmark, or, Feverish Paranoia

All posts featuring Semi-Intellectual Friend

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

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

Boo.

Turns out we haven't done a Halloween post since 2014! However, we luckily have all the right people in our life, and consequently received the following message, a little while ago, from Jonny:

So
I’ve done another toilet review
My first experience of shared toilets
However I have had a beer and I’m too sleepy to type it out

BUT
I have come up with a nifty idea I’d like to see on the blog
As a Halloween special I’d like you to interview your regular readers and perhaps some guests to find out their ‘top toilet horrors’.

Mine is when guys wee on the seat.
It’s awful. No further comments needed.
But sometimes it’s like alllll over
Like they are aiming for the seat
Ugh.
*shudder*

 We have basically never turned down a legitimate reader request (the people who keep emailing us offering a lucrative deal in Chinese portaloo import can fuck off), and we don't intend to start now.

The topos of the asshole who wees on the seat has been explored fully by Shewee Fiend Friend, most notably in the post (Don't) Aim for the Stars, in which she wrote, memorably:

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.

 
Semi-Intellectual Friend once put forth the theory that some kind of target would prevent the regrettable mess caused by males unable to aim:

I think, if you put a big red and white target at the bottom of a toilet and gave men points for aiming as close to the centre of the target as possible, men would feel patronized by it but still be unable not to try to hit the target. Toilet floors would immediately become cleaner. I think, if there was some way of recording high scores, it would be incredibly successful.

However, we have yet to see the research proving this theory. The only thing we can offer in the way of academic inquiry is this picture, adding to the vast store of anecdotal evidence showing that many men are constitutionally unable to perform tasks requiring even rudimentary hand-eye coordination, begging the question how they have managed, for millennia, to hold on to the lion's share of legal, constitutional and economic power. 

You can't see the sticky spot on the floor because a) the photographer was deliberately avoiding it, and b) the floor had, mercifully, been recently cleaned. This picture is from our very first Halloween toilet post; the seminal work which sparked the entire genre, if you will, of the Halloween bog blog post.

Asked whether she had any recent work to add to the body of research on men who are unable to aim into the toilet, Shewee Fiend Friend said:

Once, I put a sign on my toilet lid saying, 'please don't wee on the seat'. And somebody weed on the sign.  

We should perhaps change the topic here, lest we permanently traumatise sensitive readers. Jonny, who has really been getting into the Halloween toilet theme this year, no doubt for sane and normal reasons of his own, sent us a missive saying:

 Not sure if sitting on this has affected my ability to produce offspring. Maybe it's a good thing given your stats from the most recent post.

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE?

 Next, we are proud to present a tale of toilet horror so gruesome as to chill the spine of even the most hardened toilet horror sufferer - even Brits, inured to centuries of plumbing ineptitude, will find this hair-raising! It is from Tudor Friend, who heeded the call to share "top toilet horrors". Are you sitting down? Have you got a fortifying drink in your hand? Have you recently heeded the call of nature? (If not, we will not be held responsible for any terror-induced accidents.)

Per the Privy Counsel's request: a tale of toilet horror. I present to you: Toilet Horror Stories: Mexican Plumbing and Teenage (American) Boys

When I was 15, I went to Mexico on a trip arranged by my high school Spanish teacher. Several of my friends from other years went as well, including the two guys on the trip. Their room, in a fairly high-rise hotel in Mexico City, was next to ours.

We didn’t really mind that there was an open vent between our shower and theirs, because it was at ceiling level and while it let us talk to one another in the shower, a conceptually creepy event that’s just funny when you’re teenagers and friends, you would have had to be about 8 feet tall to see each other’s face, let alone each other’s anything else. The shower vent is notable architecturally but it’s the rest of the shared plumbing that pertains to this story.

Now, Mexico City has a very high water table. It was built on a swamp, so buildings do things like, you know, sink. This also makes for some, shall we say challenging, plumbing issues, especially in taller buildings. Water pressure is shit. Toilets flush as if they’re halfway through a coma and just can’t be arsed. And that’s on a good day. You’re told preemptively to minimise paper usage, and in a lot of places you don’t flush the loo roll at all, you throw it in a wastepaper basket. (Can we all say “eww”?) Luckily, at our hotel, you could flush. Barely, but you could. (You almost prayed for Montezuma's Revenge because you knew the toilet probably couldn't handle a healthy crap.)

So, one day, our bog stops doing even its most feeble flushing. We're talking, it's looking at urine and going, nope, too much effort. Which is bad enough, but the next time we tried to coax it into something resembling life, not only did it not flush the paper in the bowl, but things… other things…. loo roll and, well, crap… started coming up into the bowl. You can imagine the slight panic that ensued among the ladies of my room. We ran into the hall to find our teacher, the only one with enough Spanish to really explain to maintenance that something was very, very wrong.

“Maintenance” was a tiny little man who came up to my shoulder and had very limited English and quite a heavy accent. He was perfectly pleasant to us but was moderately perplexed. Until someone thought to question whether the boys’ toilet was also having issues.

Turns out that, for reasons only known to teenage male idiots (and probably not even to them- the thing is, these weren’t foaming stupid morons but, you know, National Merit scholars, genuinely clever lads in general, who inexplicably had the biggest brain shit conceivable, leading to other issues of dumpage), they had “decided to see what would happen if they just didn’t flush for a couple of days”. What would happen is that their toilet would, predictably, block up. And block ours up. And, as it turned out, the room next to ours on the other side.

Tiny Mexican Maintenance Man just about had a stroke. To my dying day I will see him (he only came up to my shoulder, which somehow made it that much funnier) jumping up and down, screaming, waving a plunger. “You do not do this! Flush immediately! You do not use all that paper - use one sheet and flush immediately! One sheet, one sheet! Flush immediately!”

The boys were abashed. My roommates and I were torn between horror and hilarity. And poor Tiny Mexican Maintenance Man had to spend about an hour breaking up the true horror that was sitting in the toilet bowl, waiting for a pureeing and then about eighteen flushes before the system finally cleared.

Sometimes horror is a thing humanity makes for itself. Usually when it should know better.

We promised Jonny something special for this post's Festive Video, and dutifully explored the internet's wide array of toilet-related horror, finding several satisfactorily creepy videos (this one, for example: we identify strongly with the swearing and crazed internal monologue). We even found some profoundly unsettling reflections on a previous Festive Halloween Video.


However, in the end we decided that you can dress up as a slutty pumpkin, watch scary movies and fantasise about the zombie apocalypse all you want, there is still nothing scarier than the everyday terrors endured by every single fucking one of the world's women, one third of whom, at a conservative estimate, have been subjected to sexual or physical violence in their lifetime.

Festive Video: The Dixie Chicks, Goodbye, Earl

Related Reading

All previous Halloween Bog Blog posts:

Oh! the horror! SCREAMING BLOODY HORROR HALLOWEEN SPECIAL: The British Workplace

HALLOWEEN HORROR!

It's Halloween - Time for Some Spine-Chilling Horror!

Delirium Tremens: We Indulge in Paranoid Halloween Horror

Halloween Horror - Drunken Graffiti and Mindless Lurching in Winchester

There is a fair amount of horror lurking in the background of this post:
An Annoyingly Long, But Brilliantly Clever, Post, Including Shewees, Beer, and Some Other Stuff

All posts featuring spine-chilling horror

All posts on the theme of aiming

Some more posts on the theme of aiming 

All posts featuring Jonny

All posts featuring Shewee Fiend Friend

All posts featuring Semi-Intellectual Friend

All posts featuring Tudor Friend

Nothing Short of a Long Memory

Remember when Semi-Intellectual Friend posited the idea that we were writing too many blog posts? We don't have a particularly good memory at the Privy Counsel, but what we do have is a very long memory, and we have not forgotten this inane comment from roughly August 2014.

The grind to earn one's daily crust in the sweat of one's brow, and sometimes many other places, often leaves us lacking the energy to churn out as many spirited blog posts as we would like, requiring us instead to lie panting on the chaise-longue, wiping sweat from some places you just wouldn't believe if we told you, and delicately sipping gin straight from the bottle.

However, even the most ardent drone gets to enjoy some time away from the busy hive now and then, leaving them free to buzz lazily among the herbaceous borders. If that time should happen to result in many blog posts being produced in a short space of time, then surely that is cause for celebration? Yes, we think so, too.

What better way to celebrate than by enjoying a picture of a hotel toilet in Albania? This one is courtesy of Our Favourite Aunt, who is enjoying a sojourn in that country. That queen among aunts writes:

Här i Albanien är det svårt att få tillgång till nätet vilket ger en viss abstinens
Här är mycket fattigt och mycket nya pengar

(Here in Albania it's hard to get internet access, which causes a certain abstinence
It is a very poor country, which much new money)

This unbridled squareness would undoubtedly thrill and delight Hercule Poirot!

Ooooh, even this vehicle has a square portation device! (We have discovered, to our sorrow, that there is no satisfying translation of the important Swedish word flakmoppe. Do get in touch if you can help fill this void in our lives.)

The term "new money", of course, inevitably reminds one of Gone with the Wind. Perhaps we should have a festive quote from that excellent novel? Bearing in mind that the zombie apocalypse appears imminent, enjoy these wise words from Rhett Butler:

I told you once before that there were two times for making big money, one in the up-building of a country and the other in its destruction. Slow money on the up-building, fast money in the crack-up. Remember my words. Perhaps they may be of use to you some day.

You're welcome. Now, let's quickly have an escapist Festive Video before we are overcome with sadness and anxiety! Today's Festive Video is a trailer for Magic Mike XXL, because although it turns out that we and Shewee Fiend Friend disagree on many things, if there is one topic where we are of one mind, it's Magic Mike. There is no doubt whatsoever that this is a splendid piece of cinema, that everyone should watch many times with their friends! Woof!

Festive video - trailer for Magic Mike XXL


Related Reading
All posts featuring Our Favourite Aunt
Hercule Poirot being a bit of a square
All posts featuring Shewee Fiend Friend

International Musings

Well, today is a sad day. Today, we found out the result of the Brexit referendum. Still. An upper lip as stiff as one's whisky, what?

The Privy Counsel is an international community of intellectuals (with emphasis, sometimes, on "international" rather than "intellectuals"). Our contributors and friends come from all sorts of countries, and all sorts of backgrounds. If it were not for the EU, the Privy Counsel would not exist.

And international we shall remain. And also inclusive, open-minded, and determined to fight hate with the weapons available to us - our humour, our intellects, and our hearts.

Here's how we actually feel. Or, as Laurie Penny put it, "All I can think of is: I will love fiercer, I will work harder, I will write faster, I will not give in to fear".

We have some delightful inclusive and international toilets to admire today, courtesy of Audiologist Friend, who writes:

Tror inte jag besökt en mindre toalett än denna! Lite utedass-känsla när en inte får spola ner pappret (servetter?!) i toan. Danmarks hippaste grød-matställe. Det heter Grød!

(Don't think I have visited a smaller toilet than this one! Kind of an outdoor-privy kind of feeling, when one can't flush the toilet paper (napkins?!) down the toilet. Denmark's hippest grød eatery. It's called Grød!)

A polite sign, representing the courtesy we strive towards encouraging at the Privy Counsel.

A seriously shit tap, highly reminiscent of the kind of typical British tap that makes all right-thinking people gnash their teeth in frustration and nourish fervent hopes that British people would a) travel more widely in countries that have functioning plumbing - perhaps even work or study in one, thanks to the EU's facilitation of work migration, and b) adopt functioning plumbing in their own country.

Another polite - and urgent - sign. This reminds us of toilets in countries like India, or Greece.
where one often can't flush toilet paper.

A sad receptable of refuse, shoved into a corner - a metaphor for Britain's political future?

We have heard of establishments serving porridge taking over London's gentrified areas, and are of course delighted that they now fortify and sustain the hard-working hipsters of Copenhagen, too.

Staying with today's focus on internationalism, here is a message from Semi-Intellectual Friend:

How have you not got a hand on this article?

That is of course a very good question, and one that we are woefully ill-equipped to answer. We are pleased, however, to note that the toilet in Þórsmörk, Iceland, mentioned in the article, is one that Audiologist Friend has kindly sent us pictures from in the past.

Let's finish off with an international greeting from German Friend, who kindly sent us a useful yet decorative (one of our favourite combinations!) calendar featuring toilets from around the world last Christmas:

"A clean bathroom speaks well of its user."

People seem to have been posting rather a lot of Sex Pistols videos on social media today, leading us to select one for today's Festive Video, primarily due to the words "There is no future, and England's dreaming". Still, let's remember those other words as well.

We're off now, to drink ourselves into a stupor for the rest of the afternoon. Happy midsummer's eve!

Festive Video - The Sex Pistols, God Save the Queen


Related Reading
Audiologist Friend's report from Þórsmörk: Þórsmörk, Iceland: Some Light Relief
All posts featuring Audiologist Friend
All posts featuring Semi-Intellectual Friend
All posts featuring German Friend

Ai Weiwei: Incarceration and Sanitation

We could tell you a tale of misogyny, misery, and melancholy, to simultaneously boil your blood and chill the spine. (After all, it is nearly Halloween!) All we'd have to do would be to tell you about our week. But frankly, isn't life appalling enough as it is, without us moaning about our personal traumas? Well, quite. So let us think about our own weary concerns another day and concentrate on somebody else's for a change.

Bogsley Hansson Friend, that connoisseur of all things cultural, sent us a message from Ai Weiwei's exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art. Weiwei's S.A.C.R.E.D. depicts his 2011 house arrest in China. Bogsley Hansson Friend writes:

Ai Weiwei bog art. Part of S.A.C.R.E.D.
Six boxes / dioramas you can look into that are about his house arrest / incarceration.

At the risk of being flippant, we must say that this shower scene reminds us of Semi-Intellectual Friend's shower in Thailand. Although of course Semi-Intellectual Friend wasn't, as far as we know, guarded by Chinese army officials at the time.
When we think about it, the design also reminds us of Semi-Intellectual Friend's shower in Denmark. It appears that, although competent in many areas of life, Semi-Intellectual Friend has very bad luck with showers.

The outside of the boxes, at the Royal Academy.

We would exhort our readers to support Amnesty International to help political prisoners around the world, but then there's the issue of the decriminalisation of prostitution, that no right-thinking person can support, and it all gets very muddled and confusing. One should of course still support all the other work that Amnesty does (for balance, see also Amnesty's motivation for passing the resolution to support the legalisation of prostitution), but it behoves every thinking human being to protest the de-criminalisation of people who benefit financially from trapping women, men and children into prostitution. It is not too late, by the way, to protest against the resolution: We have not given up and it is not too late.

A festive video on the theme of freedom seems fitting, n'est-ce pas? (Although of course the American notion of freedom is inherently problematic (especially in this Southern context - apart from all the colonialism and white supremacy lurking about, there is the fact that the vehicle of freedom is always a petroleum-consuming car - what's wrong with an environmentally friendly and health-promoting bicycle, for instance?), and possibly we should spend time on research in order to find something more universal, but frankly, my dear, we have had a rough week and we wish to get on with our Sunday now. Also this is a song about a woman escaping an abusive husband, and that is a concept we support wholeheartedly, whatever the context.)

Festive video - Danielle Bradbery, The Heart of Dixie

Related Reading
All posts featuring Bogsley Hansson Friend

Interview with Ai Weiwei in Vice, mentioning his bicycle

All posts featuring Semi-Intellectual Friend
A favourite post of ours, in which we get sentimental about our friends: Ask Not for Whom the Bog Rolls