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

The Ominous Unlockable Door of Perugia

We ranted last week about the importance of taking a sick day when one feels like one has been possessed by a crapulence demon, which is cackling evilly and throbbing just behind one's frontal bone, and like literally the only thing that will save one's health from ruination and despair is to spend an entire day in bed watching Peaky Blinders and swearing quietly to oneself in a fake Brummie accent.

Of course, not everyone has the ability to take a sick day when sick. If there is one thing the reporting on the presidential election in the US has taught us, it is that not everyone in this world has health insurance, or the kind of employment contract that acknowledges that one is a human being, who will occasionally need to do human things, like resting.

As mentioned previously (for instance here, here, and also here), a toilet blogger's life is by necessity filled with many activities not related at all to bog-blogging. (There are few, if any, who have struck lucky and entered the elysian fields of full-time toilet-contemplation.) Your average toilet reviewer will spend most of their time toiling in the sweat of their brow, and also other places, some of which you wouldn't believe if we told you, to ensure that the wolf is kept from the door and that the cupboard is reasonably well stocked with bread for the day.

Still, we are quite happy just to have a job, and a salary with which to buy rum, wolf-repellent, and other essentials, and are, by and large, reasonably happy with our life situation (apart from, obviously, all the sexism, and post-modernism, and all the other -isms lurking everywhere, and also all the crap plumbing).

Our life situation, happy though we are with it in general (apart from the caveats listed above), does not permit us, alas, to fuck off to Perugia on a whim and take photos of toilets. Other people, however, apparently do have the kind of life situation that enables them to fuck off to Perugia and take photos of toilets. Our Mum, for instance. She sent us an informative missive the other day, saying:

Bar Caffè Stuzzicheria del Grifo, 23 Piazza Piccinino, 20 m från domkyrkan i Perugia. Trevlig uteservering med toa för konsumerande gäster. Har 2 dörrar varav den yttersta inte går att låsa och den innersta inte går att stänga.
Har tvättmöjlighet och toapapper men ingen nedfällbar toasits. 

(Bar Caffè Stuzzicheria del Grifo, 23 Piazza Piccinino, 20 metres from the cathedral in Perugia. Nice al fresco seating, with a toilet for guests. Has two doors, of which the outermost one is unlockable, and the innermost one uncloseable.
Has sink and toilet paper but no toilet seat.)

The seat-less toilet. Regular readers will recall Jonny's similarly seatless toilet from last week.
(Due to insurmountable technical difficulties,
this and the following photos are all sideways.)

The sink. Does a piece of your soul whither away and die
when contemplating this picture? A piece of our soul does.

This is a daring piece of toilet door photography! Brava, mamma!

We believe this is the al fresco dining area

Another one of our correspondents went to Stockholm the other weekend and stayed in a fancy hotel. Why anyone would choose to go to Stockholm of their own free will is beyond us. We don't like Stockholm, never have, and never will. Still. Presumably someone has to live there. Good luck to them.

A thoroughly non-offensive set-up, n'est-ce pas?

An elegant, even dramatic - but not wholly functional - shower.

Did we mention that we adore black-and-white tiled floors? Woof!

Our correspondent, earnestly at work.

La pudeur en defaut. A thoroughly offensive picture, showing a man
subjecting a woman to the kind of perving that amounts to sexual violence.

Apparently, just like the hotel where we stayed once with Australian Friend in Edinburgh, the Lady Hamilton Hotel in Stockholm's Old Town adheres to the criterion formulated by Helen Fielding's heroine Olivia Joules. We will repeat our statement from October 2011:

Personally, we couldn't care less, but in case you find the state of the end of the toilet roll a matter of importance on a par with democracy, world peace and being able to find a really good mojito: Reader, we assure you, the toilet paper in this hotel was folded into a neat point at the end.

By the way, here is a highly festive and decorative urinal for men in Stockholm's Old Town. Shame there is no equivalent service for the ladies.

A laudably decorative urinal. Shame the lack of equivalent services for women
makes this yet another expression of public sexism.

Another instance of decorative public facilities: an old phone box preserved in Stockholm! Perhaps this is where the ladies are supposed to tend to their business?

We'll go off on a proper rant about the lack of
public urinals for women another time. Hang on, turns out we already did.

We've devoted a lot of time and energy to feministing recently, and are correspondingly exhausted. Our recent brush with indisposition and decrepitude has taught us the importance of listening to one's body, and chillling the fuck out. We are, therefore, determined to spend the rest of this Sunday doing fuck-all except perhaps lying on the chaise-longue, imbibing whisky via a funnel. (We don't know if you have discovered this already, but if you add ginger to whisky it becomes a health drink of great magnitude, which has the further advantage of tasting delicious. It works with rum, too.)

One final reflection: Something we've been ruminating lately is the need for people to fuck off more. And, when people don't fuck off (the default setting for most people is apparently to not fuck off when you want them to), for you to turn your phone off and go to bed at 7 pm, if that is what you really want.

Some words from the Band Perry have been fluttering around our prefrontal cortex over the past couple of weeks. We realise, upon looking the lyrics up online, that we misheard. Still, here is what we heard:

I just wanna stay in the dark
Turn off all the lights
Come home in time
[...]
I just wanna stay in the dark

To paraphrase Stephen Fry (not for the first time): Now we've said just about everything there is to be said, most of it inconsequential to a degree, we're mongrel-bitch tired and our fist cannot form letters any more, so fuck off, our darlings, and leave us alone.

Festive Video: The Band Perry, Stay in the Dark


Related Reading

All posts featuring Our Mum

Posts featuring sweating, in various and sometimes surprising places:

Nothing Short of a Long Memory

Educational Cake

This special post not only mentions sweating but also tells the thrilling story of when we stayed in a fancy hotel in Edinburgh with Australian Friend:
Literary Hotel Musings

A rant on the lack of public urinals for women: Piss-Poor Performance

All posts featuring toilets in Italy


If you happen to belong to the population cohort that enjoys sideways bloody pictures, ogle them to your heart's content here

A Message of, Perhaps, Hope

We came to the conclusion recently that when you find yourself at work clutching your head and feeling woozy and hungover despite not having been drinking, it's time to take a sick day.

You'd think this would be a fairly straightforward decision, but there are many variables to take into consideration. For instance, will work be able to continue without you in the building, or will the whole place spontaneously implode - even combust? (We like to think of ourselves as modest, hard-working people at the Privy Counsel, but there are barely concealed delusions of grandeur lurking under the surface, and the concept of anything ever getting properly done without us makes little, if any, sense.)

Even if your place of work does not burst into flames in your absence, is it reasonable to stay at home, you may ask yourself, when a dose of harden the fuck up and another dose or two of diclofenac would probably get you through the day, even if the bags under your eyes got so heavy you were tripping over them and you started having real concerns about liver damage?

This is one of the many situations where having good friends will literally save your life. Sure, you can take more painkillers, keep your lip stiff and upper and soldier on. But what good will it be? Who will benefit from your burnout? Fucking nobody, that's who.

We've been reflecting, over the last few days, on the good fortune of having friends with the grace and wisdom of knowing when to tell you what you want to hear, and when to tell you what you need to hear. For instance, what you want to hear may very probably be "You're so clever and amazing", but what you need to hear may well be something much more along the lines of, "Your arguments are weak and the structure of your text sucks. Now pour yourself a whisky and don't get back to me until you have produced work to the high standard of which I know you are capable if you put your mind to it". Harsh, but so much better for you in the long run.

Having friends, in short, who will tell you to rewrite your painstakingly crafted text when that is needed, or to stay in bed a whole day watching Peaky Blinders and quietly swearing to yourself in a Brummy accent when that is required for your health and sanity, is a blessing.

We've been reflecting also on the fact that we have friends who send messages like this:

I have 2 toilet reviews for you
Both with mirror selfies of course
Let me know next time Trump’s regime is getting you down and I’ll send across.

As you can naturally tell from the robust, masculine style of writing, that message was from Jonny, and a heartening message it was too. As we lost no time in telling that jovial young chap, the patriarchy gets us down all the time, non-stop, continually, perpetually, so fucking well send those toilet selfies fucking ASAP, before we really lose it. Jonny obliged. (Remember when we wrote a lonely hearts ad for Jonny? We stand by every word, including the words "a spanking good catch".)

Here you go:

There is only one word that is appropriate here, and that word is Woof!

These are The Graduate in York

I think I did a mini-review before but I nailed this selfie and I like the mirror so I did a follow-up review

[Editor's note: We have a horrible feeling that the mini-review mentioned above has not been published yet but is bobbing around somewhere in our archive, and that we have consequently made ourselves guilty of discontinuance and a lack of chronological order, for which we would apologise profusely if we thought that anyone actually cared.]

It goes downhill from here.

The soul does not soar at this sorry sight.
Incidentally, Tudor Friend once reviewed a toilet whose bog roll holder likewise required active gymnastics.

 No toilet seat. Was cold. On a positive note you get a great abs workout reaching behind your head for toilet paper.

Modern-day Romeo and Juliet-style literature adorns the walls to keep you occupied

At this point we're reasonably confident
that you've reached the same conclusion we have: There ain't no sugar-coating this toilet.

 Who even needs a coat hook..?

There is only one appropriate word here, too, and that word is UGH.
And also WHAT THE YELLOW RUBBERY FUCK?

Finally the pièce de résistance... a handy peep-hole in case you are wondering what people are up to in the neighbouring stall.

Overall 2/10

Only Jonny's generous nature would give this toilet even a single point. Readers, we will have to trust his judgement on this one. That winsome young whippersnapper continues with another review:

Toilets 2: Event City Manchester

When will designers of coat-hooks understand that no hook
will ever be truly satisfactory without an upwards curve, however slight?
Contemplating aberrations like this is one of the few moments of modern life
where one wishes there were more Freudianism around, not less.

Hercule Poirot would undoubtedly be pleased with this squareness,
perhaps even going so far as to chortle approvingly.

 Nice deep urinals

Had a long coat hook

Mixer taps

Hand driers

Oh.. and for some reason had wacky carnival mirrors:

Does anyone have any energy left with which to chuckle delightedly?

Ladies and gentlemen, we hope you feel fortified and ready to tackle the week ahead, whether it includes fighting the patriarchy or merely keeping body and soul and perhaps the odd shred of sanity together. We thank Jonny profusely for his kind contribution to this intellectual toilet blog, and hasten along to today's festive video. This one features one of our favourite girl country singers, Brandy Clark, who has a surprisingly large repertoire of songs about hangovers.



Festive Video: Brandy Clark, Hungover


Related Reading

Our lonely hearts ad featuring Jonny in his natural environment (easy now, ladies; please form an orderly queue):
Jonny and a Public Toilet - a Treat for Single Ladies

Another rampantly festive blog post: Educational Cake

All posts featuring Jonny

As the nights draw in, the  discerning reader craves a good murder mystery. Voilà: The Body in the Bathtub: A Poirot Mystery

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

Piss-Poor Performance

The German Bildungsideal has a lot going for it, comprising, as it does, not only formal training in scientific methods but a wider cultural education. When striving for Bildung, as opposed to mere training, one acknowledges that the world is a diverse place with innumerable strands of history, all equally worth pursuing, and that knowing something about things that perhaps at first feel unfamiliar may enrich not only one's life but one's research. This is what Nazis and misogynists the world over fail to understand - that diversity is a strength, not a threat, and that homogeneity stifles academic pursuits.

In short, hanging out with different kinds of people will most likely enrich one's life, in ways one cannot foresee. We have the great fortune of spending a fair amount of time hanging out with awesome Swedish teachers, who seem to be in possession of arcane, almost occult, knowledge. For instance, one of them pointed out to us the other day that Swedish reggae is a real thing. We embraced this factoid with gusto. Enthusing about it in a social media forum, another awesome Swedish teacher of our acquaintance informed us that not only has Swedish reggae been around for yonks, there are even diverse kinds, including feminist Swedish reggae!

As we pointed out in a previous blog post, "We like, at the Privy Counsel, to be seen as competent people. When you are a self-professed intellectual, you set your standards high. [...] in most areas of life we like to think of ourselves as clued-up and capable. Our source criticism is rigid, our soap is the monkey-friendly kind, and we wouldn't dream of using a semi-colon where a colon is clearly indicated." However, in our ongoing efforts to achieve Bildung, we are ever delighted to come across something we didn't know existed, especially when it is something delightful like - raarrrr! - kick-arse feminist Swedish reggae!

At other times, one learns things that are in no way surprising or new, but are nonetheless incredibly depressing, such as the fact that there are 35 urinals for men in Amsterdam, but only three for women. A Dutch woman was arrested for urinating in public the other day, and was reprimanded by the judge, who claimed that she should have used a male urinal. Clearly, Bildung is not a requirement for Dutch judges. If it were, the judge in question might have realised that actually, there are numerous anatomical, social and safety-related impediments to women who wish to use a urinal designed for men. We once tried to use a urinal in Hoxton Square, London, one new year's eve, but had to give up, despite being armed with a Shewee. There was also the time when we almost got in trouble with the police for urinating in Golden Square. And another time when we faced the dilemma of not finding a toilet in a park, and worried about perverts hiding in the bushes. Really, the lack of female-friendly facilities in the world's public places is upsetting. As anyone will testify who has ever squatted behind a shrubbery in mid-winter, worrying about being raped, there is a massive need for public urinals for women.

Before we combust with rage over the rampant misogyny in evidence everywhere, let us enjoy some soothing pictures from a very dear Lithuanian friend of ours, who recently experienced numerous adventures in Belgium:

Beer and books! Is this the perfect toilet??

Lithuanian Friend says:

Wonderful local bar in Belgium and it felt so nice in this toilet with [a book wallpaper]

As everyone who lives with a chronic pain condition is aware, sometimes a hot bath is the only thing that helps. As, further, everyone who does daily battle with the fuck-ups that comprise the world we live in is aware, sometimes a hot bath, preferably with a glass of wine, if one can get over one's paranoid fear of ending up an alcoholic, is the only thing that helps. We love this picture from Lithuanian friend of a bath tub in a Belgian hotel room. And yes! that's right! That is Emer O'Toole's Girls Will Be Girls on the bathside table.

A bathtub, and Emer O'Toole's Girls Will Be Girls - is this the perfect hotel room??

Let us move on to today's Festive Video. Feminist Swedish reggae. You're welcome.

Festive Video - Syster Sol, Bland Dom

Related Reading

 All posts pertaining to public urination:

Shewees Are a Girl's Best Friend!

A Morally Improving Story for World Toilet Day

An Annoyingly Long, But Brilliantly Clever, Post, Including Shewees, Beer, and Some Other Stuff

On dealing with fuck-ups:
If You Can Meet with Triumph and Disaster

Girls Just Want to Have Fun(damental Human Rights)

As we never tire of pointing out, we are pretty lucky at the Privy Counsel, what with having friends liberally sprinkled all over the planet who are happy to send us toilet pictures. This thought consoles us when things get too grim. There is no shortage of misery either online or in the real world, and sometimes dealing with it all gets too much. As someone pointed out on Twitter the other day, it's ok to go offline because we aren't made to process human suffering on this scale.

We by no means claim to be experts at dealing with tragedy (we can frequently be found gibbering incoherently over a gin and tonic at midnight), but one approach that we have often found helpful is to try to do one thing. Just finding one tiny thing that you can improve can make an enormous difference, not just for your mood, but for the actual world.

Give someone a compliment, send a friend a postcard, smile at a stranger (unless of course you belong to the 50 % of people highly likely to be sexually harassed for simply existing in a public place; be careful with smiling if this is the case), volunteer at a women's shelter, encourage someone who doubts themselves, support your female colleague in her fight against mansplainers, call your political representative and tell them what you think. If you have an amazing aunt, cherish her. (Check out more things you can do at this really great site.)

Remember, also, to take care of yourself. Be kind to your body, nurture your mind. When at a great party, take photos of the toilets! Our favourite audiologist, Audiologist Friend, went to one a little while ago, and sent this greeting:

Var på bröllopsfest på galleri Verkligheten i Umeå! Spolningen blev överhettad pga mycket mat och dryck, 40 gäster och festen som varade 12 h!
Fantastisk fest  

(Was at wedding party at the Verkligheten gallery in Umeå! The flush got overheated due to much food and drink, 40 guests and the party, which lasted 12 hours!
Amazing party  )

A festive, art-poster-enriched toilet!

A helpful piece of freezer tape says "The flush may need time (to recover)". We totally identify with this.

We're not entirely sure what's going on here. There is possibly greenery (yallery, Verkligheten gallery), a mirror, and a cardigan hung up on a helpful coat hook?

 Well, wasn't that refreshing! We will now continue to lie down on our chaise-longue, and stay there until Sunday night, or until the world hardens the fuck up and stops breaching human rights left, right and centre; whichever comes first.

If you have access to a chaise-longue, we recommend you lie down on it IMMEDIATELY, preferably with a large supply of alcoholic beverages close at hand.

One final piece of unsolicited lecturing before we move on to the Festive Video:

Note that women's health is under threat everywhere. Accept that reproductive rights are human rights. Understand that women in control of their fertility are better able to access education, care for their families, and build stable communities. Remember that girls' education is the key to building a better, safer world.

Festive Video - The Oxford Belles, Girls Just Want to Have Fun(damental Human Rights)


Related Reading
All posts featuring Audiologist Friend
All posts featuring gender equality
Check out more things you can do at this really great site.

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

We would argue that most of us, however competent and organised we would like to appear in the eyes of the world, spend most of our lives lurching mindlessly in whatever direction we happen to be pushed by circumstances, eagerly grasping whatever alcoholic beverage is available come Friday night. However, even though we're happy, at the Privy Counsel, to take each day as it comes and live and let live, we appreciate the importance of some kind of guidelines to steer us straight. As regular readers will be aware, we defined two mottoes to live by a couple of years ago: PEOPLE SHOULD FUCK OFF MORE and FEMINISM NEEDS TO BE MORE MILITANT. These have stood us in good stead.

Last night, the beverage available happened to be the good kind of champagne, which was pleasant to a high degree, but more importantly, we formulated a new Privy Counsel rule of life! The third rule, now added to the canon, is ALWAYS GO TO THE TOILET TWICE.

"Hang on, hang on," you may be saying to yourself now, sitting up on your chaise-longue and agitatedly waving your tweed-clad arms about. "I'm perfectly happy going to the toilet just once. Why would I go twice just because some random toilet blogger with a record of showing poor judgement tells me to?" Your concerns, if this is you, are legitimate, and your logic infallible. However, hear us out - there is reason to our madness!

Say you're in a fancy seafood restaurant. For instance, to just grab an example at random, at Johan P in Malmö. Let's say you're throwing the good kind of champagne down your throat with chutzpah, and enjoying the feeling of it being Friday night and you not having to get up at the arse end of dawn the next day. Say you go to the toilet, and enjoy the fancy décor and well-appointed handwashing facilities. Say you snap a couple of pictures, feel pleased with your efforts, and go back to the table to continue guzzling champagne. Say someone with more life experience and less impaired reasoning skills points out that the toilet is, when you think about it, a unisex one. Say you laugh this statement off, arguing that you had a perfectly pleasant time during your visit to the toilet, entirely unharassed by bearded hipsters.

However, let's say that you, being trained in scientific methodology and critical thinking - even if your judgement has been temporarily clouded by vast amounts of the good kind of champagne - go back in some time later, for the sake of scientific enquiry and journalistic integrity. Let's say that, while washing your hands, no fewer than three persons of the male sex squeeze awkwardly past you.

THE HORROR!

We have always argued, and will continue to argue, that A SHIT TOILET IS ONE IN WHICH ONE IS FORCED TO WASH ONE'S HANDS IN THE COMPANY OF BEARDED HIPSTERS AGAINST ONE'S WILL.

In this case, the males in question were not so much bearded hipsters as bloated middle-aged men in unflattering trousers, but the tenet still stands. Only someone with very poor imagination would design a venue where a woman has to wash her hands in an enclosed space with random men twice her size, and not expect her to feel nervous and uncomfortable. We say this not because we dislike men, but because the statistics speak for themselves.

The majority of all reported sex crimes are committed by men, against women. When we say "the majority", we don't mean "something like two thirds", or even "something like three quarters", but "something like 98 %". Let that sink in. Now ponder the fact that sexual predators are opportunists, who harass, grope, and assault women when circumstances allow, and you will see that unisex toilets are a TERRIBLE IDEA.

To all restaurateurs out there who are considering putting in new toilets, we implore you: HARDEN THE FUCK UP AND GIVE THE WOMEN THEIR OWN FUCKING TOILET. Women-only spaces exist not because women are irrational creatures who insist on having several expensive square metres to themselves, but because toilets and changing rooms are not neutral spaces, and because the world is not safe for women.

Let us summarise our argument: Sex is biological reality. Gender is a social construct. No matter how dedicated we are to the struggle of crushing the patriarchy and pulverising gender norms, pretending that gender doesn't exist doesn't solve the problem of sexist abuse. Hence, until we're equal, and one sex isn't constantly subjected to sexual violence by the other sex, let there be segregated toilets.

PEOPLE SHOULD FUCK OFF MORE.
FEMINISM NEEDS TO BE MORE MILITANT.
Also, when writing a toilet review, ALWAYS GO TO THE TOILET TWICE. The first time may not show you every facet or even faucet (especially if you're off your head on the good kind of champagne).

Having ranted for a suitable amount of time, let us enjoy some photos from the well-equipped, but uncomfortable and potentially dangerous, toilets at Johan P:

We have no complaints about the toilet except that it has no coat hook. Could it be any more obvious that a man designed these toilets? The equivalent of Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake" is the male toilet designer's "Let them put their handbags on the floor". No person in their right mind wants to put their handbag on a toilet floor - BLOODY WELL GIVE WOMEN COAT HOOKS!

This is all very well, but we still don't understand why sinks must look like cattle troughs.

The soap and hand lotion was very nice, and smelled of lavender and thyme!

Another aspect of Johan P is the acoustics in the restaurant are terrible. There are times when you would give your right arm not to be forced to listen to the person next to you, but there are also times when you would quite like to hear what your company is saying, and Johan P is not a good place for hearing whatever conversational pyrotechnics may be going off around you. The question of acoustics technically falls outside the range of our blog, but we thought it worth mentioning. (Let us also note, however, in the interest of fairness, that the champagne at Johan P is excellent and the moules frites are to die for.) Speaking of acoustics, we have some exciting toilets from Audiologist Friend, and also from Australian Friend and Jonny (who counts as a friend for administrative reasons), in our vast cavern of an archive - something for you all to look forward to!

Now, for a Festive Video. This one appeals to us for several reasons.

Festive Video - Shannon McNally, Lonesome, Ornery and Mean


Related Reading

Lest we lose hope: An excellent example of a toilet designed by women, for women:
Caitlin Moran Really Does Make Everything Better

If you enjoy looking at pictures of sinks that look like cattle troughs (pervert!), this is for you:
The Hours and Minutes Ticking Away

A post in which we complain about the horrors of unisex toilets and sinks in the shape of cattle troughs, simultaneously:
Stockholm Central Station: The Trauma Is So Great We Are Brought To Quoting Cicero

A rant about the horrors of suddenly finding oneself washing one's hands in the company of fifteen bearded hipster dudes, all smiling awkwardly:
Hungover Ranting: Festschrift to Medievalist (With a Side-Interest in Roman Archaeology) Friend

All posts featuring unisex toilets

All posts featuring Malmö