Perhaps Our Most Rampant Fit of Escapism Ever

We've all had them - those days when you're not paying attention and suddenly find that you have accidentally grossly insulted someone. You're having a perfectly pleasant conversation with somebody, and all of a sudden people start bellowing angrily, crying, or leaving the room. This has happened to us more often recently than you would perhaps credit.

We are all fallible, but some of us are more fallible than others. The pope claims not to be fallible at all. Be that as it may, we have certainly felt fallible as hell recently, and have thus embarked on a process of stubborn denial, procrastination, and escapism. Come with us on an escapist journey to the charming countryside church of Äsphult, in southern Sweden!

We went past Äsphult one sunny day in August last year. Times were difficult, but we enjoyed peace and repose in this beautiful church and its hygienic and disability-friendly toilet.

The toilet is behind the lefternmost door.

Isn't this a charming sign? Does it remind us of something?
Of course it does. It reminds us of this sign that German Friend once spotted!

What a superbly disability-friendly toilet!

An admirable set-up! This is what we like to refer to as the holy trinity of sink, mirror, and paper towels.

This is the kind of disability-friendly door-handle that you can open with your elbow, meaning you don't have to touch a potentially germ-infested surface after you've washed your hands. HUBBA HUBBA!

These festive dead insects brightened up the windowsill.

All flesh is grass, and all that.

We couldn't imagine a better coat-hook if we tried. Like, literally - we couldn't imagine a better one.

This is, as regular readers are aware, our favourite soap in the entire world. It comes in a friendly bottle, and smells of violets. Kafferosteriet in Malmö had the same one though with a different scent, when we went there. If you would like a close-up of the friendly bottle, check out this picture of Monkey posing with it.
The tap is disability friendly.

Photography is admittedly not our area of expertise. If you would like a picture
where you can actually see the church, try this one.

Does that feel better? For our part, not really. We will perhaps drink some rum and see what happens. And continue with our program of procrastination and escapism. Being on some beach, somewhere warm, where all the people have fucked off and only the booze is left, would be ideal.

Festive Video - Blake Shelton, Some Beach


Related Reading

Other times when the friendly Bliw soap has helped us get through difficult times:
On Mansplaining and Monastic Drains
Not Nearly Enough Monkey Business

If you are excited by the concept of church toilets, see Gärdslösa - Runes and Royalty

All posts featuring church toilets

For nice old-timey pictures of Äsphult before industrialisation and urbanisation, see:
Bygdeband

Of Cats and Monkeys

Friends, Romans, countrymen and -women! We've got all sorts of important news and toilet pictures, but first, an announcement:

THERE IS A NEW CAT BLOG ON THE INTERNET.

We've been quite vocal about this on social media, but nonetheless*, let us revisit some of the conversations that took place yesterday.

A very dear and rampantly intelligent friend of ours sent us this message:

We received this intriguing message...

As our regular readers are aware, we love nothing more than promoting weird blogs on social media, so we took to this project with our usual chutzpah and oomph, and asked for the link, so that we could send it out into the ether.

...and it just kept getting better!

So, finally, the address of the new cat blog on this great place called the internet is: catstrophil.tumblr.com. It has many, many pictures of cats. If you like cats: congratulations!

*because we don't necessarily have that many followers on social media, and hardly anybody actually gives a stuff about what we write there. Just a few friends, and maybe five other people who clearly need to get off the internet and get a life.


We have some pictures which we are pretty sure are from a restaurant in Malmö called La Brasserie. As far as we remember, we stuffed our faces with mussels, together with some relatives, and also wrapped ourselves round a bottle of rosé, this being standard procedure in our family when we can't decide between white and red.

A most admirable coat-hook! Note the grace and elegance with which it supports a bag!

This mirror was quite stylish, if you overlook how uncomfortable it is to be able to observe yourself when on the bog.

Woof! Are you enjoying the symmetry as much as we are?

We cannot approve of this sink and mixer-tap enough! We seem to remember that the soap smelled extremely nice. Whether it was also monkey friendly is of course another matter entirely.

To see other examples of us photographing our feet on stylish floors, see for instance this post, and this one. Oh, and this one! There might be other examples, but these are the ones we can remember.

Another joyful thing that has happened recently is that a supermarket manager called Tom Svensson, in a place called Fjällbacka in Sweden, has introduced "monkey marking" to help customers choose monkey-friendly products! We have written several times about palm oil plantations, the havoc they wreak on the environment, and the devastating effect they have on populations of monkeys (for instance here, here, and here). We always do our utmost to choose products containing no palm oil, or certified palm oil, in order to maintain a monkey-friendly lifestyle!
This exemplary supermarket has a Facebook page, which one can like.

As somebody said,

I'm mongrel-bitch tired and my fist cannot form letters any more, so fuck off, my darling, and leave me alone.

But first, a festive video! We chose this video because, well, we've all been there. (The fact that Meghan Trainor is wearing a sequinned cat top is a mere lucky coincidence.)

Festive video - Meghan Trainor, Lips are Movin'

Related Reading

Posts in which we display our feet on stylish toilet floors:
On Ranting, and Wine
Sober As a Judge
Caitlin Moran Really Does Make Everything Better!

Our posts on monkey-friendly soap:
Soaps, Lovely Soaps!
Not Nearly Enough Monkey Business
More Monkey-Friendly Soaps!

The Facebook page of Coop Extra Tanum 

The world's most recent cat blog: Catstrophil

More Monkey-Friendly Soaps!

What-ho, what-ho, good folks. Guess what? Sometimes there are unmistakable signs that there is hope for mankind, despite all the previous evidence to the contrary.

We have been busy organising a publicity event for a women's shelter, and have been impressed rather than otherwise by the response from the businesses we have done our damnedest to cadge favours from. All the humanity has brought the roses back to this gnarled old toilet-blogger's cheeks!

Also, we found these lovely soaps from the Danish company Urtekram:

Here is Monkey, posing happily in the sunshine
with a couple of monkey-friendly soaps and his favourite citrus plant.

They smell heavenly of roses and lavender, respectively!

As regular readers are aware, we have certain requirements when it comes to soaps: they must smell nice and they must be monkey-friendly. The devastation caused by palm oil plantations is well known and requires no further description.

Our lovely new Urtekram soaps are certified organic, vegan and not tested on animals, but we couldn't find any information regarding palm oil on the packaging so we wrote to Urtekram to ask. They sent a very polite, very conscientious and very detailed reply, explaining about their palm oil policy [translated from Scandiweigan]:

Our oil comes from both coconut oil and palm oil, depending on what's available. It is RSPO certified , but unfortunately the demand for sustainable oil is greater than the supply. It can sometimes be hard to ascertain whether an ingredient is made from palm oil, as ingredients are broken down into several parts. Here's what our product developer Tom writes on the subject (pardon the Danish):

"Vi har anvendt denne samlende term for de ingredienser for der eksisterer ikke nogen direkte oversættelse fra INCI til normalt engelsk. Det betyder:
vegetabiliska oljeprodukter = polyglyceryl-3 dicitrate/stearate, cetyl alcohol, glyceryl stearate se, glyceryl caprylate, lysolecithin, beta-sitosterol, squalene.

Flere af disse ingredienser kan stamme fra palmeolie, men hvis de gør det så er det Segretated RSPO olie der er anvendt i henhold til de forskellige leverandører vi anvender. Det betyder at vore produkter ikke forårsager fældning af regnskov.

PS Der er en hel del af de ingredienser der anvendes indenfor kosmetisk industri hvor leverandørerne skifter mellem flere forskellige olier – det kan f.eks. være kokos og palme olie, da de har meget ens fedtsyreprofil. Det er på nuværende tidspunkt IKKE muligt at garantere produkter er uden palmeolie – hvis der på et produkt står at det er uden palmeolie, så skal man straks være meget skeptisk – jo sikkert uden palme olie, men mange af ingredienserne er muligvis fremstillet ud fra palme olie!"

We're totally happy with that, and even happier with our gorgeuously scented soaps!

(If you find this sudden effusion of sunshine and roses trying, here's something you can worry and rant about: Antibiotic-resistant bacteria breed in sewers. Remember, also, the multi-drug-resistant gonorrhoea bacteria.)

Let's have a festive video.

Festive video - Ashley Monroe, Like a Rose


Related Reading
Soaps, Lovely Soaps!
The Lord Privy Seal Brings a Badly Needed Touch of Class. Also Monkey-Friendly Soaps.
Toilet Song: Soda Soap
We Get on Our Soap Box and Rant for a Bit about Colonialism

The Lord Privy Seal Brings a Badly Needed Touch of Class. Also Monkey-Friendly Soaps.

What with having a monkey among our resident staff, our preferences in the soap department are firmly centred in the orangutan-friendly end of the spectrum. Although we love sandalwood soap to the point where we go all giddy and have to sit down and have a brandy just thinking about it, we have yet to find one made with certified monkey-friendly palm oil.

Monkey gives these products the thumbs-up!

Last time we wrote a piece on soap made with sustainable palm oil was in January 2012. You'd think the world would have hardened the fuck up and stopped destroying orangutan habitats since then. However, mankind is apparently quite prone to not hardening the fuck up, and has happily continued to kill orangutans in order to enjoy cheap microwavable popcorn, instant noodles, and washing powder. (Honestly, sometimes the fucked-up-ness of the human race makes us want to down large quantities of gin and indulge in morbid rants while waving our hands about in a thoroughly cynical manner. And we don't even like gin.)

However, we managed to procure some totally monkey-friendly soaps recently! Monkey capered with joy at the sight of them, clapped his hands and went to show them to his friend the Lord Privy Seal!
But forgive us, we haven't introduced the Lord Privy Seal yet. This honourable member of the Privy Counsel was brought round to HQ one lovely day in August by Exuberant Archaeologist Friend. Once there, he got drinking with Monkey, ended up too legless to leave, and has been with us ever since. We're very happy about this - the Lord Privy Seal adds a badly needed touch of class to our establishment!

Monkey and the Lord Privy Seal both approved hugely of our choice of soaps. We got a cinnamon, orange and clove soap from the Visionary Soap Company, which contains fairtrade oils and spices, and smells lusciously Christmassy. Feeling the need for more hygiene-inducing lovely soap, we lurched into the Body Shop and grabbed a mango soap and a satsuma ditto. These soaps are all made with sustainable, monkey-friendly palm oil - three cheers for that!

Monkey and the Lord Privy Seal approve of these lovely soaps

At the Privy Counsel we reckon that, if life hands you lemons, then make yourself a really kick-arse rum and lemon cocktail. Or, you know, eighteen. In fact, Monkey and the Lord Privy Seal have already started, out in the kitchen. We'll join them in a minute, but first, let's have a festive video! We've had this one before, but we just love this song so much we'll hear it again:

Festive video - Sierra Leone Refugee All Stars, Soda Soap

If you'll excuse us, we'd better go check on Monkey - sounds like he's getting a bit rowdy out there. What? Monkey - no! Not on the fucking stairs! If you need to throw up, go do it in the bathr... Jesus Christ.


Related Reading
Other soaps we love, not all of which are, sadly, monkey-friendly: Soaps, Lovely Soaps
Totally Monkey-approved soaps: Not Nearly Enough Monkey Business
More products from the visionary Soap Company: A Visionary If Not Strictly Toilet-Related UpdateMore info on sustainable palm oil from the WWF
A list of companies that use sustainable palm oil
Palm oil - the hidden truth lurking in your home
A festive video involving lots of seals
All previous posts on soap

We Get on Our Soap Box and Rant for a Bit about Colonialism

We've been even more historically minded than usual recently, and have, in fact, had many clever and original thoughts on everything from the Berlin Conference to rubber ducks. However, we won't bother you with them; we've got much more intriguing material! What do colonisation, palm oil plantations and the drive to "civilise" the world's heathen savages have in common? Why, soap of course!
Stubbing our toes on some interesting vintage soap advertising, we thought we'd do a feature on this, for your edification and delight.

Rudyard Kipling published his poem The White Man's Burden in 1899.
It proved surprisingly useful for soap merchants, who used it
to imply that soap spreads civilisation. "Civilisation", in colonial-speak,
usually meant "sit tight while we take all your resources
and suck your country dry."
Image from wwnorton.

Caption says:
Pears' soap in the Soudan
Even if our invasion of the Soudan has done nothing else
it has at any rate left the Arab something to puzzle his fuzzy head over,
for the legend "Pears' soap is the best' inscribed in huge white
characters on the rock which marks the farthest point of our advance
towards Berber, will tax all the wits of the Dervishes of the desert
to translate." - Phil Robinson, war correspondent (in the Soudan)
of the Daily Telegraph in London, 1884.
Harrrumpf. Cucumber sandwich, anyone?
Image from ucsd.edu.

Caption says:
The birth of civilisation - a message from the sea.
"Consumption of soap is the measure of wealth, civilisation,
wealth, and purity of the people." - Liebig
Read Justus von Liebig's Familiar Letters on Chemistry here.
Interestingly, as well as having views on the civilising effects of soap,
von Liebig is also credited with being the father
of the fertiliser industry, meaning he paved the way
for unprecedented agricultural productivity and
a previously unimaginable increase in the human population.
Read more about it in this interesting book by Robert B. Marks.
Image from Ebay.

Caption says:
"I have found Pears' soap matchless for the hands and complexion."
Luckily, if you're thinkin' about my baby, it don't matter if you're black or white.
Image from kaufmann.

Soap ads verily took some very strange turns. This one is from 1899
and features a déshabillé witch on a broom, writing the name "Pears" in the sky.
We assume sales skyrocketed after this went public.
Image from sexywitch.wordpress.com.

An Australian man insists that Last Xmas I used Pears' soap.
Is this an early instance of choreplay?
Image from Museum Victoria.

Because hygiene and homoeroticism go so well together.
Not least of the pleasures of the game is the bath that follows it.
Hygeia lustily agrees!
Image from kaufmann.

Last but not least: Is your life plagued by drudgery?
Fear not - help is at hand!
(Just bloody well make sure you have a mixer tap, like this lucky woman.)
Image from vintageadbrowser.com.

Phew. That was quite a heavy post! Let's finish with an invigorating song!

Read more on the Victorian/Edwardian-era obsession with cleanliness in two of our favourite books, The Victorian House by Judith Flanders (read more about it here), and Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness, by Suellen Hoy.

Related Reading
Book Club: Cocoa and Corsets
Toilet Song: Soda Soap
Not Nearly Enough Monkey Business
The Privy Counsel Book Club: At Home
Victorian Servants Have Taken Over the Book Club

Toilet Song: Soda Soap

An invigorating Toilet Song seems to be in order! The one we've chosen for today is one that's close to Hygeia's heart, being about hygiene.
Sierra Leone's Refugee Allstars were formed in a refugee camp in Guinea in 2004, during Sierra Leone's civil war. The band toured refugee camps to keep everyone's spirits up, and when the war was over, their album Living Like a Refugee was released. As far as we understand, soda soap is a simple, home-made soap, which people tend to avoid in times of affluence, but which comes in handy when one is stuck in a refugee camp with limited hygiene facilities.

There don't appear to be any lyrics available in all the wide expanse of the inter-ma-net, but we found something even better: this lovely explanation by the singer himself.

Sierra Leone's Refugee Allstars. Image from kginsberg.de.

Related Reading
UNHCR
Oxfam Unwrapped

Face-Arse Farce

We at the Privy Counsel frequently can't tell our arse from our elbow, and we fervently believe that there is no shame in that. However, when you can't tell your arse from your face is when you really start having problems! So, how to solve such a humiliating dilemma? Well, as anyone with a disability knows, having the right aid makes the world of difference. That's why we were so utterly fucking delighted to receive this useful and amusing gift!

 Many thanks to our beautiful make-up obsessive friend!

How a Green Fairy Soap May Alleviate the Pain Caused by a Black-and-Blue Knee

A sports-related accident which has put one or possibly two (or perhaps more - nobody seems sure!) ligaments in one of our knees out of action has regrettably prevented us from blogging for a little while. (Actually, the injury has no impact on our ability to edify and amuse our loyal readers at all, but we're sure you agree that blaming a dramatic and crippling fall sounds ever so much more glamorous than "We've been busy at work".)
However, a very dear friend sent us this fantastic absinthe soap! How can one fail to recover with the Green Fairy hovering over one's bath?!

We can't wait to get a good scrub from the Green Fairy!

"Absinthe-scented" - oooh, heady, heady scent!

Related Reading
All posts about soap
More absinthe action: An Ideal Standard Husband

Not Nearly Enough Monkey Business

Monkey has long been annoyed with his local supermarket for not supplying soaps made with monkey-friendly sustainable palm oil. However, he happened perchance to go to Sainsbury's one day, and was flabbergasted with joy over finding that all Sainsbury's own-brand soaps appear to be made with Monkey-approved palm oil!

Monkey posing happily with his monkey-friendly soap. Also visible are two of his favourite soaps,
the eco-friendly rose-scented Bliw and the Bubble and Balm lavender soap

No bunnies or orangutans were killed during the making of this soap.

Smells nice, too.

Soaps, Lovely Soaps!

  With autumn comes flu season. Schools coop up children to the comfort and ease of the various germs and viruses they harbour, universities force students to get up early in the morning and breathe on each other in seminars, and the country's work-force succumbs to a violent desire to stay in bed and spend entire days watching The Simpsons.
  Hand hygiene is so important. The most effective way to protect yourself from disease is to wash your hands. Frequently and thoroughly. (You can read about all the reasons why you should wash your hands often here, and how to do it properly here. Or, if the audiovisual is more your thing, here.) We find it helpful and motivational to have lovely soap, and thought we'd share some of our favourites!

The scent from these soaps is truly divine!

  We've been to Oxfam again recently, and picked up this lovely lovely stuff from Bubble & Balm. These soaps tick all the boxes: they are made with fairtrade ingredients, using sustainable palm oil (palm oil plantations do terrible damage to the environment and make orangutans homeless), and come in a box made of recycled card, with no unnecessary plastic wrapping. And they smell delicious! Monkey couldn't wait to get a good lathering with this monkey-friendly soap!

Monkey loves lovely soaps!

  We've got some more favourites: one from Chandrika, a company from Bangalore. This is an Ayurvedic soap, containing among other things coconut oil, sandalwood oil, and orange oil. It is lanolin-free but contains palm oil, and we doubt very much that it is sustainably sourced. However, it smells gorgeous!

Contains all sorts of lovely things, according to the website:

Coconut Oil : it nourishes, moisturises and lightens your skin tan.

Wild Ginger : soothes the skin and helps prevent infections and rashes.

Lime Peel Oil : for a refreshing cooling effect and rich, penetrating lather with an astringent action.

Hydnocarpus Oil : helps prevent skin problems, rashes and outbreaks.

Orange Oil : tightens pores, helps prevent pimples and blackheads.

Sandalwood Oil : to cool, refresh and gently prefume your skin.

We think this writing might be in Kannada, the main language in the state of Karnataka, but then again it might not.

Just lovely

We wish we could send some of the fragrance your way!

  Last, but not least, here is another soap from Bangalore - the Mysore Sandal Soap. This one seems to be quite readily available in the UK, at least in Asian supermarkets - hurrah! It does contain lanolin, so is not free of animal products, but on the other hand it is, apparently, the only soap in the world made from 100% pure sandalwood oil. Then again, that sandalwood is reportedly not sustainably sourced. The commercial website claims that the Mysore Sandalwood Soap was the favourite soap of Queen Victoria, which is interesting as the company was founded in 1916.

A very cheerful-looking box

We LOVE sandalwood...

...and surely everyone loves elephants!

  We hope this abundance of lovely, and sometimes environmentally friendly and ethically sourced, soaps inspires you to keep washing your hands, for health and well-being! Hygeia will bless you!

Wæs hæl!

P.S. If you're Scandiwegian and enjoy reading about beauty products, check out http://skimmerskuggan.blogspot.com/!

Book Club: Cocoa and Corsets

 Today we continue our book club with a riveting read called Cocoa & Corsets (Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London 1984) by Michael Jubb. It contains amusing and quite often disturbing advertisement posters from the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

This was a time when both hygiene and advertising were developing and branching out into previously unimaginable directions. Nobody used soap much before the 19th century - some people still don't!
 

Soap fit for a queen: Robert Brown's White Windsor Soap, 1885. "Purest for infants and persons with delicate skin, promoting a beautiful complexion."

Handwashing is not a recent obsession: Royd Chaffeur Soap, 1907

It took a while for London's water companies to get their hygiene right. One imagines one would be pretty pissed off if, after paying one's water bill, one ended up with cholera! East London Water Consumers' Defence Association, 1898