Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts, But Totally Trust the Toilet Attendant

ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ, we muttered to ourselves as we lurched in the direction of the Acropolis, the sweat of our brow liberally irrigating the dusty streets of Athens. "Greatest however [is] water" was very much a sentiment which resonated with us. Pausing for a minute to wipe the sweat, which was running into our eyes and causing an unpleasant stinging sensation, off the aforementioned brow, we noticed a sign poking out of a nearby shrubbery. "Hark!" we proclaimed, halting. "A sign! A toilet sign!"

We saw the sign.

Teetering towards the opening in the shrubbery towards which the sign appeared to be pointing, we came across a set of steps, upon which an attendant was standing. We like to think of the steps as constituting the pronaos of this holiest of temples. 

The attendant (or, in the terminology of our deluded temple allegory, the high priest), a jovial, middle-aged man, smiled and beckoned us to follow him down. Pausing only briefly to ponder the advisability of following a stranger down a set of basement steps in a foreign city, no matter how ancient and cultured, we proceeded joyfully. (We'd like to think that our manner of descending the stairs into this public toilet was rather more dignified than that of a labrador chasing a rubber chicken, but we strongly suspect, actually, that it wasn't.)

Down we went.

"There is no toilet paper", the friendly attendant announced, regretfully, as we entered the cella. While we suspected that toilet paper did in fact exist, but that a Greek public-service toilet attendant must somehow find ways of supplementing his income to reach at least the second level of the Maslow hierarchy, we decided nonetheless to take him at his word. The truth is that, due to the abundant flow of the above-mentioned sweat of our brow, we had no actual physical need of this charming, if rudimentary, public toilet, and hence had no interest in finding out whether opening our wallet would cause bog roll to magically appear. Our needs were exclusively bog-blog-based. And boy, were they ever fulfilled!

Who needs a lock on the door when there is such a friendly and dutiful toilet attendant outside?

There was, indeed, no toilet paper. There was, however, an ingenious rubber tube-based flush system. "If we hadn't had such abundant experience," we thought proudly to ourselves, "of negotiating fucked-up British flush mechanisms, we might never have figured this one out". Luckily, though, we had, and we did.

We totally aced this flush mechanism.

Having taken our pictures as silently as possible and smugly flushed the toilet, we made our way from this inner sanctum, or adyton, back to the cella. The attendant smiled. We smiled back, washed our hands, and put some change in a bottle which appeared to be intended for tips. Whether it was the money or the smile that did it we don't know, but on our way out the attendant wished us a good day, and "good luck". We were rather touched, and proceeded to scale the rough cliffs of the Acropolis with vim and brio, generously bedewing them with our plentiful perspiration in the process.

While we hold you enthralled with our gripping narrative, we take the opportunity of annoying you with these lovely pictures of places we enjoyed going to during our sojourn in Greece.

Παραλια Βαρναβα, that is, Varnavas Beach, near Marathon. The locals here are friendly and festive in the extreme, and produce a superb limoncello!
(We remember seeing, in our childhood, an illustration of the first Marathon runner in Mad Magazine. The words "coughed his lungs up" stick to one's memory - having driven between Athens and Marathon, one is grateful that one has never had to run such a distance.)

No caption necessary.

The relatively lush greenery owes its existence, no doubt, to the irrigational properties of sweaty tourists.

View of the Acropolis from the Ancient Agora. (More on the Agora later. Totally lots more Agora action coming!)

We are naturally not going to leave you hanging without a festive video.

Festive video - Tammy Wynette and George Jones, We're Not the Jet Set

Related Reading

A post about how annoying it is when other people go on holiday and post pictures of beaches one has never been to:
Det Lille Apotek - Big Beers and Small Toilets in Everyone's Favourite Toilet Country

Another instance of us mentioning Mad Magazine:
MAD - Answering Your Toilet Paper Needs Since 1952

A post about the urgent necessity of providing public toilets:
Shewees Are a Girl's Best Friend!

An unforgettable view of a public toilet:
Jonny and a Public Toilet - A Treat for Single Ladies

An Italian public toilet:
Italian Toilets - Mi Piace Servizi Igienici

A Blog Post of Astonishing Clarity

As you may suspect, the Privy Counsel picture archive is a total fucking mess. (Read all about the pheasant situation here and here.) There is stuff that's been in there so long we can no longer identify it. Like pictures from German Friend labelled "New year's email", for instance. "What email?" we ask ourselves, squinting in the light of the guttering candle. "And, crucially," we further ponder, taking a quizzical swig from our hipflask, "from what year?"
These, dear friends, are questions that will most likely never be answered. We shall of course conduct a thorough investigation, to try to identify the festive toilet pictures from German Friend, who is one of the most faithful and dedicated toilet correspondents that the world has ever seen. But we might as well warn you now, before you get your hopes up, that the outcome is uncertain.

However, let's focus on something we do know! We know that toilet proprietors the world over are batshit crazy and commit nearly constant acts of idiocy, to the delight and amusement of everyone bent on observing hygienic facilities! Here is a delicious observation from German Friend:

Set Bologna - from a historic Italian university town where people have an on switch for water, but seem to have had trouble finding it in the past. Oh, and we knew it all along, Italians have style: a bog in a bar with a full free-standing wardrobe. nice.

Italians have a fondness for bog-related clarity, it seems - certainly there is not the slightest ambiguity about what this button is for! If you find this delightful and encouraging, read more in Finally! An Italian Train!.

Where has this coat-hanger been all our life?

We're off on a bit of an adventure, during which we shall certainly take copious amounts of toilet photos, which will then languish in our archive for the foreseeable future. Maybe we should have a bit of a philosophical quote, to fortify our spiritual strength before setting off? This one comes from H. P. Lovecraft, via Medievalist (with a Side Interest in Roman Archaeology) Friend:

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.

Oh, and also there may be developments in the "everything is totally fucking fucked up all the fucking time" situation. Victory, and sweet, sweet vengeance, have not been ruled out.

Festive video - Miranda Lambert, Only Prettier

Related Reading
All the previous, gloriously festive posts from German Friend: 
German Friend Label
Finally! An Italian Train:
Finally! An Italian Train!
Another superb Italian toilet:
On Her Majesty's Privy Service
The word "aqueduct" comes, of course, from "aqua":
Let Us Wash, for the Germanic Hordes May Appear at Any Moment

On the Nature of Academic Friendships

Sometimes* we can't tell whether our friends are being nice or sarcastic. This is most likely due to the lofty echelons of intellectualism in which we move; practically everyone we know spends up to 85 % of their time worrying about things like intransitive verbs in dead Germanic languages, the difficulty of dating medieval church architecture incorporating flint, or the importance of tin mining to Bronze Age warfare, and disdaining non-experts in their field with the kind of hauteur usually only found in dead French aristocrats**. The high level of pedantry that is required for maintaining meaningful discussion on this type of subject means that most of our friends are absolute fruitcakes at the best of times, and if someone should happen to be drunk, you can wave lucidity good-bye and prepare to write it long letters on scented paper***.

Anyway. We have received missives, from more than one source, containing a link to a certain newspaper article. Our correspondents were, we think, being kind. Or possibly they were being cuttingly sarcastic. We're fucked if we can tell the difference. Anyway, the article, from the Guardian, warns against the dangers of leaving unsuitable elements - like, say, excrement, or toilets - in estate agent pictures when trying to sell a house.

"Obviously, you're in it for the toilet, but I feel like that article has a lot to offer," says one chum.
Another crony explains: "You have to scroll down to find it, but there is in fact a photo of a kitchen with a toilet plopped right in it," continuing, "Have you ever come across this particular plumbing phenomenon before?"
The answer, friends, is yes. (And oh, how we wish it wasn't.)

*Practically all the time, especially when drunk.
**It could also be that we don't help matters by thinking about a) toilets, b) Richard Armitage, or c) a wonderful combination of both, more than what is strictly necessary.
***Seriously, if we had a penny for every time we've woken up hungover with a napkin full of crazed, pseudo-intellectual scribblings on the floor, we'd have enough money to build ourselves an aqueduct. A marble one. With little turrets every mile or so, and bunting.

An update about Quasi-Intellectual Friend's surprisingly clever pictures, which we couldn't publish the other day due to him putting them somewhere we can't find them, then totally and utterly failing to send them again: Quasi-Intellectual Friend has attempted to make up for his astonishing cack-handedness by providing another image. "A lovely water-saving toilet!! At the Museum of Wine, Chinon," Quasi-Intellectual Friend cackles, raising his eyebrows in that way he does, supposedly imagining it to look intellectual.

We do approve of this water-saving arrangement with all our heart.
HOWEVER. How is one supposed to wash one's hands in this tiny sink
without inadvertently touching the toilet seat? Riddle us that.

In other news, we have decided that things may not be too catastrophically bollocksed, after all, despite our recent despondency. We may still be hurtling towards shit creek at an alarming speed, but we suspect that there may, in fact, be a paddle or two tucked into the hold. Let's have a festive video and drink some rum.



Festive video - Kacey Musgraves, Follow Your Arrow


Related Reading
Australia is truly pioneering when it comes to water-saving technology. Read more about it here: Why Today Is a Toiletally Important Day
More rampant sarcasm:
"Oh for Shame, How the Mortals Put the Blame on Us Gods" - We Indulge in Melodrama
Another wine-related tap:
Taps, Wine and Elvis!
And another wine-related tap:
Kronovall - More Castle Shenanigans
Found another one:
In Good Spirits - Börje's House
Let's do one more:
Festive Things That Are Red

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

Knowing that all our readers are currently in a frenzy, desperate for an update on our current fucked-up situation - which we have been, to use an established word in a transferred sense, vaguebooking about, with a certain admirable chutzpah, for some time now* - we hasten to enlighten you.

Absolutely fuck-all has happened. The situation is still deplorable. There.

Still, even desperately fucked-up situations can bring about bright spots on the horizon. One such bright spot is that we get to embark on an adventure - more on this later. Another fantastic perk is that declarations of sympathy from our general acquaintance have been pretty much unilaterally accompanied by offers of sending toilet photos! We normally receive ample amounts of photos even when things are going well, and now that everything is monumentally fucked up, the offers have multiplied! So there's a reason to stop feeling sorry for oneself and harden the fuck up, right there.

In order to cheer ourselves up and not be guilty of dragging our friends - many of whom are very pleasant people - down with us into the dragon's lair of depression, we once again risked our eyesight (read all about the pheasant situation here) by making a daring raid into the Privy Counsel archive. (We care deeply about our friends and don't want to distress them either with unrestrained pessimism or excessive optimism.) There, in the dank and gloomy vaults, we found a supremely festive picture from Jonny, which has inexplicably lain untouched since September last year. (Jonny, on the other hand, has demonstrably not lain untouched, in any sense of the word - our thoughtful lonely hearts ad on his behalf reportedly generated a roaring response.)

As a bonus, you also get some thrilling epistolary action, involving Jonny, the Privy Counsel, and Medievalist (with a Side Interest in Roman Archaeology) Friend!

Jonny: There is a mixer tap behind the bike. Also the option of split taps for us stupid English people. Yeah, interviewing a pro BMX-er. I'll ask him about toilets. "So, what's your favourite part of the Privy Counsel?" "Probably the royal we."

The Privy Counsellor: Ask him how often he washes his hands, while leering and winking. 

Medievalist (with a Side Interest in Roman Archaeology) Friend: Dirty. DIRTY!  

Jonny: Please don't use my professional work as an excuse to get your kicks.

Jonny's tiny bike and an amazing double set of taps!

*for instance here and here.

Time for a festive video! In the Pistol Annies' own words:

This is for everybody who's barely gettin' by.

Festive video - Pistol Annies, Lemon Drop

Related Reading
Jonny's finest hour:
Jonny and a Public Toilet - A Treat for Single Ladies
Another festive contribution from Jonny:
The Comfort of the Familiar - Life, Jonny, and Everything
A totally disgusting contribution from Jonny:
What Goes Around, Comes Around
Medievalist (with a Side Interest in Archaeology) Friend's finest hour:
Roaring Good Roman Fun
Challenge - see if you can spot the Pistol Annies in this festive Toilet Tale:
A Rootin', Tootin Toilet Tale
One of the Pistol Annies, Angaleena Presley, features in a Toilet Song post:
Toilet Song - Pain Pills

Foul Play, Also Fowl Issues

It's been one of those days again. There has been a profusion of spiders, mansplaining, and general fuck-ups, tripping us up and cramping our (normally pretty damn edgy) style. The level of fucked-up-ness demonstrated by the world at large lately is excessive to the point of actual obscenity, and shows no sign of lessening no matter how much whisky we chuck at it. We are steeped to the gills in Weltschmerz and, as if all the other stuff wasn't enough, suffer from very painful and annoying blisters on our feet.

We had intended to delight and amuse you with some surprisingly clever pictures from Quasi-Intellectual Friend, who has briefly come out of the woodwork (or was it the asylum he came out of?) and sent us a batch of toilet photos, but can we find the damn things? Can we bollocks. We can't even get the massive, angry rant we had planned as back-up off our chest, due to a tiring technical cock-up.

In an effort to calm down and prevent ourselves from having a massive, collective apoplexy, we braved the onslaught of the enraged pheasant living in our archive (there is no sign of the dwarves - we don't know what happened to them) and dug out some festive pictures. "Well, strike us pink with a sheaf of medium-quality printer paper," we said to ourselves, while trying to shield our eyes from the pheasant's really rather sharp beak, "here are some pictures from that time when we went to Sir Toby's with Obsessive Emmerdale Fan Friend, and some other nice friends, to watch the rugby, and Wales won, or lost, or disappeared in an earthquake, or similar."

(Due to - you guessed it - yet another technical fuck-up, these pictures are arranged sideways. If you find this perspective invigorating, there are plenty more here, here, and here.)

We believe we intended this picture of toilet-door graffiti to illustrate a point,
possibly one to do with the fragile nature of human existence, or similar.
Possibly we had just drunk too much Guinness and lost our judgement.

As a friend of ours once said, on a memorable occasion,
"Rock'n'roll ain't dead, it's just been getting fucked in a ten-dollar bed".
No, we don't know what that means, either.

An unintentionally artistic picture.
The message here is a prosaic "this looks like a hygienic tile-and-toilet-roll-holder combo".

This picture illustrates our current, rather cornered, situation.

Do we remember seeing a yellow sink at another festive location?
We do indeed! Oh no, hang on, that was a yellow toilet.

We have said everything there is to say about air-dryers in a previous post called AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH! AIR-DRYERS!

Here, enjoy this view of a reasonably charming window. Here's another one, at the Red Lion in York.

Semi-Intellectual Friend has been singularly alert recently, and sent us an interesting word. The word is anatidaephobia.

Anatidaephobia. Look it up.
Image from i.chzbgr.com.

Semi-Intellectual Friend has also been making some rather feeble jokes about our supposedly fragile mental state. Semi-Intellectual Friend can, as he is well aware, shove said feeble jokes where the sun don't shine. However, Semi-Intellectual Friend also said, in a brief moment of lucidity - and we're going to make a bit of a thing about this quote here, because we thought it was rather profound - the following words:

Irony exists for a reason and that reason is to be slathered over everything spoken or written like grease on a fat man's belly when he's being thrown down a hill.

On that note, we ought really to have a festive video, oughtn't we?


Festive video - Ashton Shepherd, Look It Up

Related Reading

Other pubs we have been to through the years:

A pub we unwisely entered in the company of Quasi-Intellectual Friend: The Rook and Gaskill - Well, the Beer Is Good
A pub that saddened us: The Royal Oak - We Revisit A Dear Old Pub with New Toilets
A nice Danish pub we sweated profusely in last summer: Det Lille Apotek - Big Beers and Small Toilets in Everyone's Favourite Toilet Country
Oh, you know. Some stuff happened: An Annoyingly Long, But Brilliantly Clever, Post, Including Shewees, Beer, and Some Other Stuff
Reminiscing about happier times: De Consolatio Philosophiae

Sir Toby's Pub & Restaurang
Davidshallsgatan 21
211 45 Malmö
Sweden
http://www.sirtobys.se/

Invaluable Life Advice from Uncle Sean

Turns out our bitterer-than-usual outpouring of angst yesterday caused worry and concern. Well, we'd just received a picture of Jonny in the bath - what the hell did you expect? To soothe the fears of our readers, however, let us reassure you that our troubles consist not so much of imminent doom and despair as of massive, multiple (and, we hasten to add, metaphorical) pains in the arse.

Let us therefore make amends for causing some of our friends to worry to the point where they were on the brink of packing a suitcase full of whisky and booking a plane ticket, by providing a light-hearted post full of, if not positively rampant joie-de-vivre, at least a decided conviviality.

We are grateful to Uncle Sean for this contribution. That connoisseur of quality urinals says:

To drive the point home, the advice is both bloody and painfully legible.

Mothers worry. Give her a ring, you prat.

Proving his worth as a toilet blog contributor, Uncle Sean follows up with the following eminent drinks bottle. (It's when you start taking pictures of random, only-tenuously-toilet-related things that you know you are an obsessive toilet perv and have definitely skidded to the wrong side of the sanity spectrum. Welcome to the club, Uncle Sean.)

Suggestive of the loo and by extension the flushable deposits therein, but all is a ruse, as the inspiration for the brew is a strongly masculine (but amusing) rock-n-roll podcast.

You were worried that there wouldn't be a festive video, weren't you? Well, tough shit - you worried needlessly!

The video is priceless for the advice, the scenery, and the passing images of wilderness toilets. Go Blue Bagging!

Festive video - Washington Trail Association, Do It Right: How to Poop in the Woods. 

(Read more here.)

Related Reading

Posts about toilet-related environmental concerns:

HTFU - Wipe for Wildlife

Toilet Paper - It's Time to HTFU!

Other places where one needs to dispose of human waste: SPACE!

Space Waste

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

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

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

Come hell or high water: British plumbing at its finest

Jonny says, in his truly inimitable style,

Typical English plumbing fix

Duct tape and a Tupperware lid

At least it's a mixer tub, huh?

Where did that bottle go?

Festive video: Ramblin' Jack Elliott, New Stranger Blues

Related Reading

Previous posts involving Jonny:

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