The City Museum in Winchester: Circling the Drain

You know the feeling, right? You're trying to read an academic anthology, but the gaggle of lunatics who wrote it believe that making diagrams incorporating fourteen arrows pointing in different directions while haphazardly letting off terms like "a sense of not-knowing", "multi-voicedness", "experential", and even "warranted assertibilities", is a reasonable use of everyone's time.

That feeling, when the world looks like this, and you are having to restrain yourself from opening the window and flinging yourself onto the warranted assertibility of the very hard terrace below.

You yearn for a time when life was simpler. Like when you spent two days getting shitfaced in Winchester and taking crap photographs, for instance. Here are photos of some ace signs at the City Museum, Winchester.

Life in Winchester in the mid-1800s was basically one big Cholera Babe Parade.

Obsessive Emmerdale Fan Friend likes to explore complex intellectual concepts
using interpretive dance, if given half a chance. This option doesn't seem available in this case,
but efforts have been made, in the past, to analyse the tension in an exciting drama.

Topography is such a bitch.

Did we mention we love signs, especially cholera-related ones?

THIS IS WHERE IT GETS REALLY EXCITING.

LOOK! IT'S A MEDIEVAL LAVVY SEAT!

We think that's enough for now, don't you? Also we really need to finish that book. Let's have a festive video full of filth, medieval peasants, and anarcho-syndicalism.

Festive video - Constitutional Peasants, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Related Reading
Previous posts about Winchester:
Halloween Horror - Drunken Graffiti and Mindless Lurching in Winchester

Thomas Crapper Day Greetings from Winchester!

The Cholera Babe Parade: Woof! Cholera Babe Parade!
Our favourite guide to the city of Winchester will ever remain Shewee Fiend Friend
Sewers, gratitude, and John Snow: Plumbing, Blessed Plumbing
Read all about Thomas Garnier, fierce botanist and anti-muckabite, here.

Halloween Horror - Drunken Graffiti and Mindless Lurching in Winchester

Are you afraid? Are you very, very afraid? It's totally up to you of course, but you really should be.

Regular readers may recall our pub crawl round the ancient city of Winchester with Shewee Fiend Friend, our favourite feminist academic, back in January. As well as enjoying the historical and cultural aspects of the city, we took the opportunity of getting sloshed on the terrific local ale, and sampling some really scary absinthe.

After consuming said scary absinthe, we lurched into the Black Boy pub. To be honest we don't remember a lot of what happened in this excellent establishment (we have a vague memory of a Christmas tree, and of talking to a very nice PhD student (or two?)), but Shewee Fiend Friend probably showed us all the weird stuffed animals tucked away in every corner of the pub, and then we most likely drank lots of beer. Oh, and at some point we wended our way to the toilets to take some photos, obviously. The results may be viewed below.

This sad-looking donkey is probably thinking that you shouldn't dress monkeys in kilts.
Personally we rather approve of the sand buckets. Safety first!

We call this still-life "Drunken toilet photography with poinsettia".
Do you also get shivers down your spine at the sight of non-mixer taps? Brrrr.

We don't know what this contraption is, but we have photographic, if rather blurry,
proof of there being one of those towels that you pull. We're fucked if we can remember what those fuckers are called,
but we thoroughly approve of them.
Also we find the graffiti on this thing, whatever it is, rather charming.

"Get a life, tossers!"
We couldn't agree more.

One approvingly spots the word "wanker" scribbled on the wall.

We love this.

"Ice-fishing rules:
- Only go Nov-Feb
- Take crampons
- No pushing, running or petting"

One of our personal all-time favourite bathroom graffiti quotes, this classic bears repeating:
"Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll
Speed, weed and birth control
Life's a bitch and then you die
So fuck the world and let's get high"

THIS IS WHERE THE CREEPINESS STARTS.

THEN IT GETS WORSE.

AND WORSE.

Although unrelated (as far as we know) to the Black Boy pub,
we find this notice in St Swithun's Church REALLY CREEPY.

Happy Halloween! We're off to bang some coffin lids and engage in a supple danse macabre down the local graveyard. Have a festive video!

Festive video - Bobby "Boris" Pickett and the Cryptkickers, The Monster Mash.
(We have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA why it says "Elvis Halloween Disco" on the video. But it's a pretty damn festive idea, n'est-ce pas?)

Related Reading
Previous Halloween posts:
Delirium Tremens: We Indulge in Paranoid Halloween Horror
It's Halloween - Time for Some Spine-Chilling Horror!
HALLOWEEN HORROR!
Oh! the Horror! SCREAMING BLOODY HORROR HALLOWEEN SPECIAL: The British Workplace

Thomas Crapper Day Greetings from Winchester!

How do you intend to celebrate Thomas Crapper day? This important day falls, Wikipedia tells us, on 27 January, and clearly requires some sort of festiveness. Though he didn't - as every educated person knows - invent the flush toilet, Crapper did invent other useful things like the ballcock, and innovate the hell out of existing inventions.

Never hesitant when it comes to a chance to celebrate, we thought we'd honour the inventor of the valveless water waste preventer by posting some photos from our recent jaunt to Winchester!

Shewee Fiend Friend, having spent large amounts of time in this venerable city, guided us confidently and efficiently through the pubs of Winchester, paying special attention to the weird and the wonderful, and ensuring that by the end of the night we were not only thoroughly hammered but had seen some truly amazing toilets. This is why we make such a big deal of our friends - they're so goddamn awesome!

We started our Winchester pub crawl by wending our way to the Wykeham Arms, a truly great pub, filled to the rafters with atmosphere and mind-bogglingly excellent local ale.

The toilets were behind this charming door

You know how we feel about non-mixer taps, so we won't distress you with more ranting.
The soap was good, though!

We do love it when one gets not only lovely soap but lovely lotion, too!
You can get more of this soap-and-lotion combo, as well as an exciting toilet,
at Grays Court in York!

Admirable paper towels!

Here's a random drunken shot
of the toilet interior, for your delight and edification.

The excitement starts here!
IT'S A CRAPPER TOILET!

Fire-engine red! With an amusing lever!
Rather too hot to handle!
(Pun, as always, intended.)

This placard was helpfully displayed above the toilet.

Personally, we can't get enough of beautiful sinks with soap AND hand lotion!
We end up so giddy with joy that we don't even know how many points to award.

Ain't it a beaut!
Sanitan don't appear to have a website, but you can check out
their Facebook page if that kind of thing rocks your boat.

Last but not least - this fancy watermark really made our day!

 As far as we remember, our day in Winchester was festive to a very high degree. There was, apart from excellent pubs (more reviews coming!), homemade ginger beer. And cats. And a nunnaminster. The kind of stuff, in short, that makes life worth living!

So how many points do we award this bog? We're fucked if we know. But we really enjoyed it and can't recommend it enough!

Related Reading
Halloween Horror - Drunken Graffiti and Mindless Lurching in Winchester
Posts related to Thomas Crapper:
Thomas Crapper: The Silence of the Toilets
Right up Our Alley
Gleeful Antics at Grays Court
Toilet-Related Celebrities
New Year's Musings
Historical toilets:
Historical Toilets, Baths and Kitchens - a Useful and Humbling Lesson

A post related to Thomas Crapper only tenuously, or indeed not at all:
The Old Ballcock and Chain, or, An Open-and-Shut Case, or, The Long Tap Lever of the Law