Love, Politics and the Revolution

Did you hear that? That was the sound of us exhaling, immediately followed by the sound of us glugging wine in an unrestrained manner.

As we hinted the other week, in an annoyingly cryptic fashion, things have been pretty provoking of late. But today, lo and behold, we find ourselves, not perhaps stomping our boots uproariously and waving balloons, but at least wiggling our toes pleasurably and winking roguishly at postmen. Also we've had some rather encouraging news which made us inclined to consider engaging in an activity not dissimilar to breakdancing.

We are not, furthermore, the only ones in a genial mood. Our contact at the sewage treatment plant in Källby - that queen among sewage treatment plants - went there this afternoon, to indulge in some sludge inspection, or a similar happy activity. She had to wait for a bit for the person she wanted to speak to as he was busy. However, the jovial sewage engineer then treated our friend, as if to make up for the wait, to an impromptu memory cavalcade about said sewage engineer's childhood, including tales of going to Denmark to buy sugar, or possibly beets.

(We are rather jovial ourselves at the moment, being wined up to the gills, and can't quite remember what the Danish produce in question actually was, only that in those days you apparently got 100 Danish kronor for only eighty Swedish ditto - a fairly fascinating factoid for a Monday night.)

As if to complete the general feeling of geniality, Audiologist Friend has sent us pictures of a lovely unisex toilet in Luleå! She writes:

Dags att visa upp det moderna Luleå. Det nyrenoverade badrummet i Smedjan är den perfekta mellanlandningen efter en förmiddagspromenad på isvägen, på vägen hem.
Jag vet att du inte är ett fan av unisextoaletter men var ändå tvungen att fota och skicka till dig.

(Time to demonstrate the modern Luleå. The newly renovated bathrooms at Smedjan [a shopping centre] are the perfect stopover after a forenoon-walk on the ice road, on the way home. I know you're not a fan of unisex toilets, but I still had to take photos and send them to you.)

As regular readers are aware, we are deeply committed to protecting the rights of transgender people. However, we have a massive problem with unisex toilets, at least if they are designed wrong. We love sharing a toilet with transgender people, and fully understand the dilemma of having to choose one of two gender-assigned doors, when one doesn't identify with either gender, or not with the gender one most resembles physically.

However, we do not, under any circumstances, want to share a public toilet with cis men. (Especially not if said cis men are bearded hipster dudes, as reported previously in a tale of spine-chilling horror.) This means that, if a unisex toilet is designed in such a way that women have to share a space, including the space by the sink, with men, then we are against it.

We have never felt threatened by a transgender person. However, we have often felt threatened by cis men. We are of the opinion that public toilets should be safe spaces, where a woman may let her guard down without being threatened, assaulted, sexually harassed, or mansplained at. A unisex toilet with a sturdy, lockable door, noise insulation (all toilets should have this anyway), and its own sink, is perfectly fine by us. A unisex toilet with uncomfortable stalls and shared, mix-gender sinks will be hated by us until the sun explodes and turns the Earth into tiny specks of dust.

We have mentioned, in a previous post, the sheer evil of certain American politicians, depriving transgender people the use of public toilets due to a professed concern for women's safety. As it turns out, reports Patheos, the number of transgender people to have been arrested for sex acts in bathrooms in the States is currently zero. The number of Republican senators to have been arrested for sex acts in bathrooms is three.

Committing a (presumably consensual) sex act in a bathroom is obviously not the same thing as committing an act of sexual violence, but we maintain our stance that the most common danger to women and children is cis men, i.e. normal dudes.

This unisex toilet looks like it might have its own sink behind a lockable door,
making it an acceptable option, unisex-toilet-wise.

A friendly and welcoming, and hopefully privacy-shielding, screen.

This picture gives us the jitters. WILL WE HAVE TO SHARE THIS SINK WITH BEARDED HIPSTER DUDES? is what we are asking ourselves. Hopefully there is a separate sink behind each of those doors.

We have a treat for you, Festive Video-wise! We went to our favourite rock'n'roll club, Rock'n'rollklubben in Lund, the other night, and had the very great pleasure of seeing and hearing a band called Amaroka. They had come all the way from Belarus! And they kicked arse! (We have some rather splendid photos from Rock'n'rollklubben to show you, by the way, in the near future.)

Amaroka represent "positive punk rock" and their songs, as far as we can tell, are 50 % about love, and 50 % about politics and the revolution. Amaroka in fact played in Kiev during the Ukrainian revolution, and were consequently banned by the Lukashenko regime.

The following video kicks arse on so many levels one loses count - it features a dog, a girl with awesome eyeliner, and a young man flipping pancakes! Enjoy! (We also enjoyed this song, and so did our mum.)

Festive video - Amaroka, Разрываеш

Related Reading
Our rant about the word forenoon: High Noon, Hell, and High Water - A Very Long Linguistic Rant
Our rant on why we don't like unisex toilets, if designed wrong
Our review of a unisex toilet we really liked, at Bee Bar in Malmö
Our classic rant on mansplaining
All posts featuring Audiologist Friend

We usually feel compelled, when ranting about the patriarchy, to point out that we have many male friends who would never dream of acting in a sexist or boorish manner. Some of them may be found featured under the following labels (in alphabetical order):

Bogsley Hansson Friend
Czech Mate

German Friend

Intellectual Friend

Mr Smith

Obsessive Emmerdale Fan Friend
Semi-Intellectual Friend

Uncle Sean

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

On Machiavelli, Venereal Disease, and Cat-Sitting

It is when you find yourself reading Machiavelli, genuinely hoping to pick up some advice on how to sort out your life, that you realise there is no progression happening anymore - you have already gone to hell in a handcart.

Leaving aside, however, the existential aspects of reading Machiavelli, here are the main tips we have picked up from this Renaissance mover and shaker:

1. Don't ever let your soldiers put their loot in a bank, or bury it. Make sure they spend everything they've got, so that they will always be hungry for more fighting.

2. Don't ever build a fortress on high ground, as this is easier to mine, and thus break into. Build your fortress on a plain, and dig wells, to channel the blast from any mines placed under your walls.

3. Don't be changeable, frivolous, effeminate, cowardly, or irresolute.

4. When invading a country, remember that a state with one strong ruler (like for instance Turkey) will be harder to take, but easier to hold. In contrast, a country with a weak ruler and many regional lords (think France) will be easier to take (there will always be a discontented baron who can be bribed), but harder to hold (you then have to put all the barons in their place and make sure they don't betray you in turn).

5. Don't let the children of your dead enemies live, out of misguided mercy. They will inevitably try to kill you in ten or twenty years' time. Off with their heads!

6. It is better to be feared than to be loved. At least if your aim in life is to rule a Renaissance-era city-state, or equivalent. (Machiavelli is firm on this point. Fear, not love.)

Machiavelli offers no advice on how to deal with syphilis, which is odd, considering this is a disease that plagued all strata of society in the 16th century, not excluding, of course, the Vatican. If we may offer you our personal advice in this area, it is this: Syphilis isn't that bad these days, but, whatever you do, don't catch gonorrhoea.

Moving on to more toilet-related concerns, we asked Meandering Friend if she still had the video of the famous disco toilet of Stavanger. However, it turned out she had only recently deleted it from her phone, in order to free up space! This is a tragedy of Titanic proportions, but never fear! We will simply have to conduct a field trip to Stavanger to drink beer and go to the toilet - let us know if you're keen to accompany us.

Meandering Friend writes:

Här kommer ett random toafoto istället från min nuvarande position som kattvakt i Lund (kanske kan göra nåt av det bloggmässigt? )

1. Smart konstruktion gjord av billigt-flygbolagstejp och toarulle för att alltid, när en inte är där, hålla toadörren öppen (#ingenjörskonst)... 

(Here is a random toilet photo instead, from my current position as catsitter in Lund (perhaps you can make something of it, blog-wise?) 

1. Smart construction made of cheap-airline tape and an empty toilet roll in order to always, when one isn't there, hold the toilet door open (#EngineerArt)...)

2. Gå på toa med en fyrbent kompis? (#neverwalkalone)

(Go to the loo with a four-legged friend? (#neverwalkalone))

Meandering Friend adds that there may be a film clip from a random waste disposal centre in Norway coming, if she can find a way of sending it via her phone.

We are not naturally of a Machiavellian bent at the Privy Counsel (except of course when people hang the toilet roll the wrong way round - there is no limit to how long we can carry on a toilet roll feud). Sometimes one needs to remind oneself that it's ok to stop trying so damn hard, and just drink some beer.

(Unless of course you are running a Renaissance-era city-state (or equivalent). All the bodily idioms apply here - you need to be on your toes, looking over your shoulder, keeping a firm grasp on your accountants, and steering everything with a steady hand. No beer for you!)

Festive Video - Billy Currington, Pretty Good at Drinking Beer

Related Reading

Ok, so actually, we sometimes get paranoid and say things like "the enemy is mobilising", which is fairly Machiavellian.

Previous posts featuring Meandering Friend:

A Picture of Johnny Not Holding a Fruit Pie

Disco Fever in Stavanger

Our favourite cat blog is still, by the way, Catstrophil. It has many pictures of cats.

Don't forget that there is a right way and a wrong way to hang toilet roll.

Remember that time when we visited a sewage treatment plant and managed to philosophise, while there, on how to avoid catching syphilis?

You Only Live Once, And Sometimes Even That's Too Much

We are prone to vaguebooking at the Privy Counsel. We admit it. More than once (for instance here, here, and here), we have been guilty of unleashing a full-on vague-whinge, mournfully hinting that things are "a bit grim right now" but refusing to specify what ails us.

Well, guess what. Things really have been grim - so, so, so, so grim - lately. We would actually quite like to tell you just how grim. But, this being a blog devoted to a) toilets and b) rampant intellectualism, we make a point of not boring our readers with tedious details about our personal life (except of course in the case of Jonny, who is, by the way, still single). So instead, we are going to forget our troubles by enjoying a rant related to a toilet which one of our correspondents experienced at a feminist conference not too long ago.

Said feminist conference took place at a place called Malmö Live. For readers who don't regularly keep up with the goss from southern Scandiwegia, Malmö Live is an incredibly ugly conference centre in Malmö, Sweden, which cost staggering amounts of the taxpayers' money, and now constitutes a daily blot or haemorrhage on the Malmö skyline.

Right up until the moment when some edgy young architect decided to outdo Hieronymous Bosch in nightmarish visions, and went and designed this, it was literally impossible to imagine an uglier building than Malmö Live. It seems that Malmö politicians like to pretend that they live in Sydney, or downtown Miami, and thus encourage the erection of gut-punchingly ugly wannabe skyscrapers, to help maintain this illusion. Thus, the historic harbour area of Malmö is rapidly being clogged up by hideous constructions of glass, steel and brick. The brutalisation of this culturally significant area will no doubt be regretted by future generations, nauseated by the sheer hideousness of Malmö Live and surrounding areas, but by then it will of course be too late.

Nonetheless, though the outside of Malmö Live is so ugly it makes you want to rip out your eyes and throw them in a vat of acid, the inside isn't bad. The conference areas are actually rather stylish and pleasant, with ear-friendly acoustics, and the toilets could be a lot worse.

This coat-hook passes our rigorous quality standards, being sturdy
and able to support a stuffed-to-bursting bag on a wet day.

The sinks are rather small, but the mixer taps are beyond reproach, and the soap smells nice.

Normally, the only colour we hate more than orange is brown, but we don't mind these orange doors. In fact, we find them rather festive. 

This toilet-roll holder is also beyond reproach, though the toilet paper is bleached.

Our correspondent indulging in a fulsome toilet selfie.

When things get really bad, we at the Privy Counsel look at pictures of Caitlin Moran until things feel better. Today, we felt the need to watch actual videos. Here's one that we found really helpful. If you, too, are struggling, have a cup of tea and watch this soul-soothing interview.

Festive video - Caitlin Moran's Moranifesto

Related Reading

All posts featuring Caitlin Moran

When things get REALLY bad, we especially recommend this post, in which we describe the group hug we once enjoyed with CatMo:
Caitlin Moran Really Does Make Everything Better

All posts featuring Malmö

Two posts featuring the colour brown:

Jazzing Things Up in Oslo
Brownian Motion, or, Brownout, or, A Brown Study - Semi-Intellectual Friend's Shower

Go, Just for the Record

How are you, dear readers?
This is obviously a rhetorical question, since a blog is mostly a one-way communication channel. Still, how the hell are you? If you are unhappy, for instance if you live in a country where mixer taps are rarer than a unicorn in a paddling pool in Alaska after a nuclear meltdown, write to us and tell us about it! Or if you are happy, perhaps because you are in a country where hot water is pumped from underground and transported across the country in a massive communal grid, then don't hesitate to get in touch. As did for instance Audiologist Friend, that scion of hearing aids and toilet photography!

Audiologist Friend writes:

Här kommer veckans fångst. Det nya helt veganska fiket, praktiskt nog har det placerats granne med vår lägga* i rvk. Vad det heter? Vinyl såklart. 

(Here is this week's catch. The new totally vegan café which has been conveniently placed next to our pad in Reykjavík. The name? Vinyl, of course.)

*We have never actually seen the word lägga used in this way before. We reckon it is either a colloquial term for lägenhet, "flat/apartment", or an autocorrect error. If you are familiar with this term, either because you are linguistically aware or because you are one of the cool kids, do not hesitate to get in touch and reduce our ignorance.

A charming vista of a hygienic and festive toilet

A friendly ladder serves as a reminder of the fallibility of human nature

Hubba! A close-up of the actual vinyl player with an actual speaker! One is highly likely, on regarding this picture, to erupt in an exhortation along the lines of, "Slave, cease your cymbal-playing this instant and book us a flight to Iceland!"

We have had occasion to reflect, recently, on the subject of family. Ours isn't prone to owning wicker, but otherwise we subscribe to many of the views expressed in this Festive Video.

Festive video - Kasey Musgraves, Family is family

Related Reading

The post in which we waxed lyrical on the topic of the hot-water system in Iceland:
Power Trip: Hellisheiðarvirkjun

Posts featuring another lovely vegan café, Goji in York:
Goji in Goodramgate - Come for the Tea, Stay for the Toilets

Goji: Returning to the Scene of the Cake

All previous posts featuring Audiologist Friend:
A Ray of Light from Spain

Þórsmörk, Iceland: Some Light Relief

A Fatally Fascinating Sequel

Jazzing Things up in Oslo

Cracking Some Suds in Kreuzberg

How to Love Handles

Apparently There Was a "Best Norwegian Café" and "Best Latin Translation" Competition, and Here Are the Winners!

A Life-Affirming Experience

Educational Cake

Tally-ho, gentle readers, and congratulations - you are reading another post from your favourite bog blog!

Sexism is thick on the ground as ever, and the world continues to be plumbing-challenged, but here at the Privy Counsel, we keep fighting the good fight to bring you rampant gender equality, quality pipes, and amusing bloggery.

As our fans and friends know to their chagrin, a toilet blogger's life is filled with many, many non-toilet-related activities. Life and limb must be kept together, and bread for the day must be procured through toil and trouble and through much sweating of one's brow. Nonetheless, every now and then, when one is in the middle of procuring bread and wiping sweat from one's toiling brow, something amazing and plumbing-related happens. Like when this cake, to celebrate World Plumbing Day, suddenly turned up in our workplace, for example. That's right. A CAKE. TO CELEBRATE WORLD PLUMBING DAY! We didn't even know there was such a thing, but luckily, others did!

Cake! WORLD PLUMBING DAY CAKE! We didn't even know there was such a thing as World Plumbing Day, and then we found out through CAKE!

We have Tudor Friend to thank, as so many times before, for the following bog pictures. Let us get cracking without further ado! Tudor friend writes:

The tragic toilets at the Derby Indoor (Down-market) Market... Getting the loo roll from that place works best if you happen to be a contortionist. Not sure what the logic was there.

One could write a kick-arse country song about this, called "(I Am Not a) Contortionist Blues".

Meanwhile, in the Derby local history centre... That is not a filter, that's what happens when you walk in. Blue ultraviolet light. It's either pretending to be disinfectant, or they have raves often.

As far as we know, this kind of blue light generally indicates
a wish to prevent people from injecting intravenous drugs.

Tudor Friend has been very active in her toilet-informational activities lately - here is another gem from that delightful procurer of plumbing lore: Bathroom For Service Dogs Opens In Chicago Airport.

We don't know about you, but we feel an urgent need for a Festive Video featuring non-racist, non-homophobic, non-sexist and non-ageist sentiments. These kinds of sentiments are, in our world, the hallmarks of sane and normal people, but seem to be under threat all over the place.

The Brothers Osborne have been criticised for doing a music video featuring non-heteronormative love. Social media resounded, when the video was released, with the unstructured rantings of homophobes and haters. Rolling Stone magazine, indulging in more covert criticism, called the video "unorthodox". What they meant, of course, was "normal" - white, young, heterosexual love not being the only type of love that exists in this world.

So let's have a taste of an actual non-heteronormative country song, and rejoice in the possibility of sanity and normality. And rum, of course. We think that non-racism, non-homophobia, non-sexism and non-ageism should be celebrated, preferably often and preferably while consuming rum. AND CAKE.
Also we totally fancy the pants off the Brothers Osborne.

Festive video - Brothers Osborne, Stay A Little Longer

Related Reading
All posts featuring Tudor Friend

Two posts featuring our favourite Brothers Osborne song ever, Rum:
A Moderately Cheerful Update
Five Fabulous (And Frightening) Years: The Story of the Privy Counsel

Ketchup and Other Sauces, Real And Imaginary

We trust that all our readers are familiar with the ketchup effect, whereby a desired quantity of something fails to appear for a long time, only to overwhelm one in abundance when one least expects it. We won't go into tedious details of the various ways in which toilet pictures have landed in our archive. Let's just say that there is a scientific shit-ton of stuff.

We are writing this on a train, believe it or not, which is a lot less exciting than it sounds. There is for instance no whisky in our immediate vicinity. Nor are there balloons, or attractive film stars, or any of the other things one would expect to find on a train on which one is writing a post for a high-quality bog blog.

Those of you who follow us on social media will be aware that we suffered a terrible calamity the other week: we lost the wifi connection at Privy Counsel HQ for an entire week! Luckily it came back, but we have not quite recovered from the shock, and are still having to restrain ourselves from shaking our fists maniacally, and putting pencils up our nose.

Tudor Friend sent us a message saying:

To celebrate your return to wifi: have some toilet photos. I took them when I was at Kensington Palace for a lecture back in December.

And the last one, my favourite, the sign for the ladies'!

We actually received a postcard from Tudor Friend some time ago, which looked like this:

Kensington Palace with Victoria in all her glory, on her throne

The postcard read:

Dear favourite Privy Counsellor, 

I'm sat in the entry to Kensington, which smells beautifully of greenery and orange peels from holiday swag. As I cannot attach them to a postcard, photos must be sent later, but I've photographed the bogs here for you. 

Though Victoria's actual ass ne'er sat upon today's "thrones", one can still imagine bad plumbing, the stink of sewage and cholera (although the loos here are quite fiercely clean). On the down side - no hook for one's bag. But the bathrooms give you rooms, proper privacy, and they're big enough to swing the cat (right into the toilet bowl, where it belongs). And you know it's royal, because there is actual sanitizer available to clean the seat!!! 

Both the taps - MIXED!! - and soap are on sensors and require no touch. Victoria's home it may be - Victoria's era hygiene standards it is not!! Four and a half stars - down half a point for the hook and slight paint-shabbiness on the room doors. But the way they distinguish ladies' and gents' is pretty cute. 

 Woof! What a refreshing epistle! These toilets seem to reach a royal standard - though not quite the Privy Counsel standard, considering the lack of a coat hook.
And yes, Tudor Friend italicizes words when writing postcards - our friends are that awesome. (Read our thoughts on the word cute, by the way, here.)

Before we break to run a meat skewer through the annoying man opposite us speaking loudly on his phone, let us have a gander at this photo a friend sent us, featuring two of our favourite people in the entire world.

Why these people are allowed out unsupervised
is as much of a mystery to us as it is to you.

We've got a special festive video today, to celebrate our return to wifi and the imminent demise of men on trains with no appreciation of social codes regarding noise levels, or personal space: an Elvis cover featuring Pete Whitelock! Also known as Pistol Pete! A legend in York, and the world! 

Festive video - Pete Whitelock, One Night

Related Reading

Remember when Kate Middleton stayed in a hotel, that had a toilet?
All posts featuring Tudor Friend
All posts featuring cholera
The Cholera Babe Parade

More posts featuring experiences on trains:
Finally! An Italian Train!
Trains, Sweat, and Fears
Trainspotting