The Weight of a Talent

 You know when you're in a job interview and the cold, clammy hand of fear grips you as you realise you forgot - once again - to prepare a sane and reasonable answer to the question "What are your strengths and weaknesses?". You find yourself gaping, rather in the manner of a medium-sized cod, trout, or halibut, with a look on your face resembling that of Bertie Wooster realising he's got to marry - through no fault of his own - Honoria Glossop. This, as all civilised people agree, is a perverse and horrifying question, and asking it should absolutely be in the UN statues regulating crimes against humanity. Be that as it may - being moderately narcissistic, we tend not to focus on any flaws we might theoretically have here at the Privy Counsel, but swot up on our strengths whenever we get the chance. Such as they are. 

Having mostly misspent our youth and also our adult age, and being on track to largely squander our impending middle age, also, our talents might perhaps most honestly be described as "varied", "diverse", or "miscellaneous" rather than, say, "amazing" or "financially rewarding". However, one happy result of our having spent so much of our time writing a weird blog about toilets instead of, say, learning bookkeeping, crocheting street art, or networking with key players in the industry, is that we know a really good urinal when we see one. We don't remember ever consulting a career counsellor in our youth but if we had, now's the time we'd like to go back in time and triumphantly tell that smug adviser to their face that See? we know about urinals, so there. Anyway, Shewee Fiend Friend sent us these photos from a hotel in Canada:

We always find bars on the wall reassuring.

A beauty!

Yes, reader, that does read Twyfords Ltd., Hanley, England.

Our curt Canadian toilet photographer says:

I found a toilet for you

Actually the toilet itself is terrible

But the urinal was excellent

The hotel was founded 1926. The urinal could be from then?

But the rest of the bathroom is just old and grungy, not cute and antique at all

We shall of course be having a stern word with Shewee Fiend Friend about her use of the word "cute".

Meanwhile, Jonny - that splendid specimen of British manhood - has been to a Gordon Ramsay restaurant, causing us to ask ourselves whether Gordon Ramsay is the perfect representation of Orwell's Colonel Blimp? We have no idea, so instead here's a passage from "British Cookery":

 

When Voltaire made his often-quoted statement that the country of Britain has "a hundred religions and only one sauce", he was saying something which was untrue and which is equally untrue today, but which might still be echoed in good faith by a foreign visitor who made only a brief stay and drew his impressions from hotels and restaurants. For the first thing to be noticed about British cookery is that it is best studied in private houses, and more particularly in the homes of the middle-class and working-class masses who have not become Europeanised in their tastes. Cheap restaurants in Britain are almost invariably bad, while in expensive restaurants the cookery is almost always French, or imitation French. In the kind of food eaten, and even in the hours at which meals are taken and the names by which they are called, there is a definite cultural division between the upper-class minority and the big mass who have preserved the habits of their ancestors.

 

We're not sure what relevance this quote has, if any, for the below pictures but there's a time for quoting Orwell and that time is all the time.

"Nice urinal cake!", we commented. "I didn't sample it myself," quipped Jonny, laconically. "I stuck to the menu items."

This looks hygienic and well lit.

Yes, it's a Crapper crapper.

Here we go again with the cattle troughs.

Finally, here's a hot photo of Jonny and some air dryers.

Also, an important announcement: A friend of ours who recently visited Greece, and lived to tell the tale, brought us back an amusing soap called "Venus Secrets", which purports to contain ass's milk. Yes! Ass's milk! As a result of performing our ablutions with this miraculous beauty product, we expect to soon (the packaging doesn't specify a time frame, but reasonably within three to four weeks, surely?) be wielding the fascination of a Cleopatra and - who knows? - engaging in some festive naval battles and maybe destabilising an empire. Watch this space.

For our Festive Video we were naturally going to use Morrissey's Boy Racer ("He thinks he's got the whole world in his hands / Stood at the urinal / He thinks he's got the whole world in his hands / And I'm gonna kill him"), but Shewee Fiend Friend recently had an experience with this song and thought it had a profound significance in terms of the human condition, Weltschmerz, etc. 

Festive Video: Miley Cyrus, Used to Be Young

Related Reading

All posts featuring Shewee Fiend Friend

 That time  Intellectual Friend used the word "cute" and we had conniptions

All posts featuring Jonny

All posts featuring sinks looking like cattle troughs

 All posts featuring Canada

Per Aspera ad Astra; or, Musings on Perfection; or, Off-the-Chain Crazy

Perfection. It is our destiny, as a species, to be always striving for it yet never reach it. We toil, sweat and strive - per aspera ad astra - yet are doomed to an eternal state of not quite getting there; a perpetual Salieri syndrome. The preconditions of our existence forbid the concept of perfection to exist except as an imaginary ideal. Plato helps us to come to terms with the impossibility of perfection by inviting us to view the world as made up of eide, perfect forms or ideas, which however are unavailable to us; what our senses perceive is but a copy of the perfect form, crude and imperfect.  Even if we were to achieve perfection, the ancients tell us, we cannot hold onto it, for everything is in flux. In a universe defined by entropy, the attainment of perfection can only ever be an illusion; a fleeting phenomenon; a bird in flight glimpsed for a moment in the flickering light of a longhouse hearth. Panta, as Heraclitus would have it, rei. The quest for perfection is bound to cause frustration and, if not actual weeping, certainly the gnashing of teeth.

Or, as Oscar Wilde philosophised: We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. In other words, the world's a mess, there are rampant slugs voraciously eating everything we've carefully planted, and we've ground and gnashed our teeth to the point where our dentist feels compelled to ask some very unsettling and weirdly personal questions: Perfection is indeed a fleeting, unattainable ideal. However, if we follow the example of our favourite Irish poet and raise our eyes from the sewer, drain, or gully in which we are ensconced, we may contemplate, if only for a moment, the celestial spheres planted in the sky for our delight and edification. The stars here represent, as our alert and intelligent readers have already gleaned, the unattainable ideal of perfection: the eidos. We are here going to make a rather bold claim, namely that we have identified three such celestial spheres that, contrary to the claims of that ass Plato, exist in our actual physical world. The contemplation of these stellar phenomena make life, we would argue, bearable. 

It is very rarely that one agrees fully with anything one reads or hears. Whether because of ideological differences; cold, rational reasoning; or unrestrained delusions of grandeur; one is sure to get hung up on some statement, claim or supposition and present counter-arguments which may or may not be unbearably pedantic. (Hell, we don't even agree with everything Our Mum says, though we defer to her on most issues.) There are, however, as mentioned above, three exceptions to what we may term the Rule of Perpetual Disagreement; three reachable stars of, if you will, earthly perfection. 

The first star of earthly perfection is this podcast episode about the correct approach to Christmas decorations, by Swedish intellectuals Ann Heberlein and Anna-Karin Wyndhamn. This cerebral and aesthetical oeuvre is a masterpiece of logic and sanity, and frankly comes as close as possible to perfection as it is possible to get in this flawed, imperfect world. Tust us: you may take every word as gospel. 

The second celestial sphere of impeccable exquisiteness is George Orwell's essay on how to make tea. Though the gods of Olympus toy with our fates for their own amusement, manipulating us and forcing us to navigate such hellish phenomena as hangovers, slugs, and corporate trust exercises, they have granted us a panacea: Camellia sinensis and boiling water. No-one understands the divine properties of tea, or expresses the correct method of wielding it, better than Orwell. Consider, for instance, his first point:

First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays—it is economical, and one can drink it without milk—but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. 

Aah. Read it, and let yourself be soothed by wisdom, wit, and hot water. 

The third heavenly phenomenon which makes life bearable is of course equestrian statues. Time, however, is fleeting; more on this another time.

Let us quickly move on to something else which surely approaches the status of a celestial sphere of perfection that we may glimpse through the imperfect prism of this mortal coil: Bog pics from Jonny! That handsome rascal has been to Wales, and what he has been up to we had better not divulge for fear of shocking sensitive readers. You may be sure of this, however: If George Orwell's instructions regarding tea represent the sublime, then Jonny's bog pics from Wales symbolise the chaos of the human condition. Having sent us pictures of some very beautiful and intriguing hygiene facilities, Jonny then writes: 

I have a less beautiful one.

Wondering where that room on the left leads?

Here.

 

 

Since it is our custom to post a toilet selfie from Jonny, in order to boost morale along our readers, here's one from earlier this year. 

The poet Nashe claims - and who are we to contradict him? - that,

Spring, the sweet spring, is the year's pleasant king,

Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,

Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing:

Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-wo!

 

Doubtless he is not only right but would have chosen, if given the option, to illustrate his poem with this picture of Jonny.

This post's Festive Video represents, if you ask Shewee Fiend Friend, perfection. Permit us, if you will, to disagree. If it makes you feel better, the message that preceded Shewee Fiend Friend sending us the link to this piece of music read:

What was the terrible but amusing song we listened to immediately before getting drunk in the hipster pub where we had poutine?

Life. You only get one.

Festive Video: Fucking Werewolf Asso, Alphonse Laurencic

Related Reading

All posts featuring Our Mum

This podcast episode about the correct approach to Christmas decorations, by Swedish intellectuals Ann Heberlein and Anna-Karin Wyndhamn

George Orwell's essay on how to make tea 

All posts featuring Jonny

All posts featuring  Wales

All posts featuring Shewee Fiend Friend 

All posts featuring Increasing incoherence and eccentricity

More stuff about the poet Nashe