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

For reasons we'd rather not go into, we ended up glugging, with wild, frenzied abandon, a sneaky pint with Shewee Fiend Friend recently. The venue for our frenzied abandonment was a charming place called the Toulouse Lautrec, which is blatantly not located in Elephant and Castle. We spent a very festive evening ranting about life, the patriarchy, and everything, and generally getting mildly shitfaced and heeding the call of nature, as one tends to do when in that condition. The most interesting feature of the toilet in this laudable establishment was the double lock on the door. We cannot applaud this detail enough. Nothing makes a girl feel safer than being able to securely lock the door when going to a pub bog!

Do you feel your heartrate slowing and your breathing becoming regular?
Yeah. Just looking at this dual lock arrangement is relaxing. 

Another feature we liked was the festively, indeed exuberantly, floral toilet and sink. (The separated taps, obviously, made us want to rip them out with our teeth and chew them into tiny pieces, but if there's one thing that age brings it's maturity, or if not maturity then at least hard-boiled cynicism and a profound lack of giving a fuck any more.)

A floral toilet bowl totally makes life more bearable, n'est-ce pas?

The simultaneous feelings of detached approval and raging vitriol make us confused
and inclined to roll our eyes while gibbering incoherently.

Another thing that made this toilet memorable was the interesting mould design on the wall.

We're assuming this is intended as an Art Noveau-esque decoration.

The pretty window above the door represents, we suppose, the higher plane inhabited by the fine arts - a place rich in lofty thoughts, vivid colours and rarefied air.

The coat-hook is broken, but hey, frenziedly holding onto your handbag while doing your business,
praying to deities you normally don't believe in that it won't fall on the toilet floor never killed anyone, right?

Since we're on the subject of Shewee Fiend Friend, we might as well mention the shewee again. We had the very great pleasure of attending a social occasion recently which involved a fair amount of beer, and at this delightful shindig, the age-old problem of where to do one's business when drinking in a public park reared, as it is wont to do, its ugly head.

We very nearly went to see a man about a dog in this public place once.
Read all about it here.

Even though the park we were in was rich in shrubberies, one hesitates to venture forth into the undergrowth. Not only is it (probably) illegal to do one's business in a public place, it can also cause a variety of unpleasantnesses. For instance, there could be all kinds of perverts lurking in the bushes, and if a lady has, for privacy's sake, ventured quite far from her friends, they might not hear her scream should she be molested by a vegetation-dwelling assailant. Another weighty concern is the severe discomfort of baring one's arse in insect-infested greenery.
The obvious solution is having a shewee with one, thus enabling one to heed the call of nature comfortably while in nature, for instance by standing next to a bush, as opposed to cowering inside it. Our beer-loving friends had never heard of the shewee, so we thought we'd enlighten them. You know who you are - now you know!
(In case you're wondering about the fate of the park and its insects, rest assured that our friends are both clever and resourceful and actually found a toilet.)

Our friends in this picture are valiantly resisting the urge to take a leak in the greenery behind them.

Talking about shewees and Shewee Fiend Friend brings to mind our fabulous New Year's Eve party, during which, you may remember, we tried out the urinal in Hoxton Square. This ties in nicely with a picture that Semi-Intellectual Friend sent us some time ago, of a charming urinal in an unknown location.

Pure class.

Nobody beats the Brits for sheer thoughtfulness.

Semi-Intellectual Friend's missive (which followed on an urgent bulletin from us saying we had done an internet test to find out what kind of dog we are, and that the answer was "Great Dane") read like this:

Oh god. I'm still far too hungover to type. Sorry.
That is the most pressing news bulletin I think I have ever seen, and I'm only sorry that I wasn't able to respond to it sooner on account of being, first, very drunk and then too hungover to press things or feel emotions without wanting to vomit.  A message that exciting? If I had read it again, I would have vomited for sure. Wow. A great Dane. I guess, from a purely physical perspective, that is probably the dog I would most associate you with. Also, the innate modesty that a Great Dane has fits you to a tee.

Sorry if they're a bit blurry - I was, as I mentioned before, a wee bit tipsy the other night so there was a lot of swaying from side to side going on, and I was going as fast I could. I got a few funny looks taking them.
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.

See how the finely-wrought narrative of Semi-intellectual Friend's epistle ties in with a theme from one of Shewee Fiend Friend's letters? Remember the "loo lament", bewailing the urine puddles on the floor, caused by her feckless, urinating flatmate? Well, Shewee Fiend Friend isn't living in that house anymore, and all is now well with the world.

On that note, we've been hardworking to the point of actual insanity lately, and deserve some rest and maybe a beer or eleven.

Related Reading
Shewee Fiend Friend's classic celebration of the shewee:
SISTERS STANDING UP FOR THEMSELVES
A story of mindboggling incontinence:
Shewees Are a Girl's Best Friend!
Shewee Fiend Friend's notorious flatmate who kept pissing on the floor:
(Don't) Aim for the Stars
A rallying-cry for more public toilets:
A Morally Improving Story for World Toilet Day