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

One Battle Won, But the War Ain't Over

Editor's note: 

I had meant to post this yesterday, but there was an emergency at the women's shelter where I volunteer, and I had to go help out. Let us not kid ourselves that the law protects women and children from men's violence. 

Ingrid

Funny how people get upset about violence against women when it is committed by "other people". The belief that only "other people" - i.e. scary foreigners, and refugees - sexually harass women, for instance, seems quite widespread and is a never-ending source of wonder to every woman who has ever been present in a public space.

Sexual harassment happens in all kinds of places, and is an activity indulged in by all kinds of men, from all kinds of backgrounds. It rarely raises concern, or causes publicity. Women are expected to put up with a certain amount of violence. It is presumed that men "can't help themselves". The notion that persons of the male sex are impulse-driven beasts who can't control their actions is deeply insulting to all men, but seems common in most cultures.

The Swedish journalist Ivar Arpi expressed his opinion recently, in an editorial in a national newspaper that should be ashamed of itself for publishing such tripe, that men's violence against women is due to genetic programming. So according to Arpi's reasoning, violence against women is "natural". Thus we can all stop our efforts to address the structural and cultural issues that make women subordinate to men, in the happy belief that this is how nature intended things to be.

We would like to know what other phenomena Arpi considers to be caused by biological differences. Men's higher wages? The fact that black American men are more likely to be incarcerated than white ones? The supremacy of the Aryan race? We would dearly love to hear Arpi's thoughts on the matter.

Last time we were sexually harassed, it was in the security check at Copenhagen Airport in September. We're still waiting to hear if the Danish police can be bothered investigating the matter. To be honest they don't seem to be  bothered by the fact that staff at Copenhagen Airport appear to have been systematically subjecting women to sexual violence for years.

Presumably, if we had been attacked by a swarthy man with a foreign-sounding name, not a bog-standard Dane, the police would have put more effort into their legal obligation to investigate crimes. But perhaps we are doing them an injustice. Let us assume, until we know for definite otherwise, that Danish police care deeply about the safety of women. However, we shall continue to warn our female friends and acquaintances to not travel alone through Copenhagen Airport.

Women - to be as safe as possible, always travel with a man! And make sure his ownership of you is clearly displayed, for instance by wearing a wedding ring, or taking his surname.

We had meant, in order to uphold the standards of this blog and make a show of sticking to the topic, to do a feature post on hygiene-related sexual harassment. We had planned to describe, in a humorous vein, all the times we've been sexually harassed in a hygiene-related environment, like for instance public swimming pools. However, thinking about all the times men have got away with harassing us entirely without repercussions turned out to be intensely depressing.

Instead, we've got this charming narrative of dealing with manspreading from Shewee Fiend Friend, that stalwart scion of harden-the-fuck-up-ness. We found it immensely inspiring!

So this guy beside me on the tube is totally invading my personal space with his 17 newspapers 

So I reached out and touched his foot with mine 

Just to see 

While texting you 

And he leaned forward to check right away and was really bothered by my foot infringement

That is a pic of how much of his arm is on my side 

So most 

And that's not when he's changing pages, and it's suddenly ALL of my space 

Anyway, I think I will touch his foot again 

He didn't like it 

It made me a little uncomfortable 

But the huge rolled up newspaper between his legs dropped when I lightly touched his foot the second time 

VICTORY!!

What a stimulating story! We expressed our admiration of Shewee Fiend Friend in no uncertain terms. She explained that she had moral support: "A friend was egging me on." Here is a screenshot of said friend's encouragement:

We have said it before and we'll say it again: our friends are amazing!

Meanwhile, Tudor Friend sent us this inspirational picture:

An eco-conscious and extremely practical barbecue

It is a hick barbecue! We have never, in all our life, seen anything quite so fabulous, and we are pretty fucking old.

It seems we're all about inspiration and clodhopper escapades today. Here is a picture from Jonny:

Jonny calls this "You sunk my battleship".
The joke "Is that a bottle of rum in your bath, or are you just pleased to see me?" somehow springs to mind.

It is possible that we have posted this picture before, but somehow, one can never get enough pictures of Jonny in the bath.

Let's have a festive video. Let's have this one, which illustrates that
a) there are dudes who are aware that a woman will not necessarily be enthusiastic about him trying to talk to her, however charming he believes he is (many dudes are aware of this. But many are not),
and
b) there are dudes who give a shit about domestic terrorism - we are here choosing to use Rosie Batty's term domestic terrorism, which is intended to highlight the fact that more people die from domestic violence than terrorism - and are intelligent enough to realise that ending it takes a bit more effort than scratching your armpits and ranting "Not all men", while going prematurely bald. 

Festive video - Sam Hunt, Take Your Time

Related Reading
On Violence Against Women

High Noon, Hell, and High Water - A Very Long Linguistic Rant

It seems but a day or two since our last blog post, and yet how many things have happened! How much we shall have to tell! (And how much we shall have to conceal.)

Let us begin with some linguistic musings. We engaged in a discussion on the word forenoon with Shewee Fiend Friend, some days ago. The Oxford English Dictionary will have you believe that forenoon is a word still in common use, but we all know this is a bollocks suggestion. Nobody uses the word forenoon outside of Victorian novels, and this is  a crying shame.

To speakers of other Germanic languages, which still retain the equivalent of the word, the discontinued use of the excellent word forenoon in English is a puzzle and an irritation. How is one supposed to express temporality when the language has been deliberately stripped of one of its most useful words? Scandiwegian languages, for instance, have the word förmiddag, and variations thereof, German has Vormittag, and Dutch has voormiddag.

Originally, various dictionaries inform us, forenoon, and its Germanic cousins, were used as synonyms to morning, ie the time before the afternoon - much as in modern English. However, in modern Germanic languages, the equivalent of forenoon is much richer than that.

Jonny, comparing himself to Colin Firth with not very much subtlety in a dark photo clearly taken well into the afternoon, says:

"I'm like a fine wine, getting more refined with age. Next stop, Mr. Darcy distinguished Gentleman.
[...] You can also add that my shot was in a toilet."

If you are a wanton female and you find yourself thinking, upon regarding this picture of Jonny, "HUNKA HUNKA!", then do get in touch. We say this not because we wish to be arrested for pimping, but because we happen to think that Jonny is a nice boy, despite his sometimes immature and often vulgar attitude.

(We say "wanton female" because a) the type of female who frequents this blog tends to veer towards the shameless spectrum, and b) although we are rampantly in favour of non-heteronormative constellations, we believe that chicks stand a greater chance of success with Jonny than dudes. Anyway. If you haven't seen it already, have a gander at this lonely hearts ad we did for Jonny once, and, if it rocks your boat, get in touch: theprivycounsellor [at] gmail.com.
On a related note, this interview made us go HUNKA HUNKA!)

When one for instance staggers into the kitchen, hungover and rueful, round 11 am, to attempt to make oneself tea without vomiting, it is clearly not morning. The morning, in civilised society, only lasts until about 10 am - as soon as you get into double digits, you are in the territory of the forenoon.

The distinction is important because saying you did, or intend to do, something in the forenoon, as opposed to the morning, can indicate a variety of things. It can indicate that there is no rush - that something doesn't need to get done till the forenoon; or that, as in the example above, one was so hungover that one didn't manage to do something until well into the forenoon; or that somebody was late, not arriving until the forenoon; or that one has no intention of doing something early in the morning but is set on waiting until the forenoon. The forenoon not only makes the language richer, but removes stress!

The word forenoon is of course a compound of the preposition fore and the noun noon. Noon is specific to English; other Germanic languages appear to retain variations of the word middag / Mittag, meaning, naturally, "middle of the day" (though if one is to believe the OED, the Norn language in Shetland appears to have been more perverse in this respect than others). Why English speakers have felt the need to take recourse to the word noon is beyond comprehension. (Regular readers are aware that we are rampantly mistrustful of Latin, especially when it is opposed to a Germanic language. Latin can be useful when one wants to compose witty slogans against mansplaining, but apart from that, we consider a Germanic tongue much more satisfying.)

We harbour strong antipathies towards the word noon at the Privy Counsel, and have done ever since we read somewhere that noon derives from the Latin nona, signifying the ninth hour. This only makes sense in a monastic system, where the day starts at three am. THREE A.M.! The notion of starting the day at three am should horrify and appal all right-thinking people.

When discussing the unreasonableness of this with Shewee Fiend Friend, we wondered how the hell this kind of system was supposed to work in northern Europe where there is no daylight until 8 am at the earliest, and sometimes not at all. Is one supposed to run around performing monastic duties in the dark? Isn't that dangerous? Wouldn't it be better if everyone stayed in bed until a reasonable hour? (At this point Shewee Fiend Friend, we are sorry to say, made a lewd and unscientific suggestion, which we by no means intend to repeat. The discussion took another direction entirely after that.)

Here is a gratuitous picture of Colin Firth in a bath-tub.

However, our opinion of the unreasonableness of the term noon was somewhat tempered on looking up the word in the OED. Apparently, says this soothing authority, noon originally denoted the hour around 3 pm. If this is the ninth hour, then clearly the day doesn't start until 6 am, which is a lot less horrendous than 3 am. Apparently, in the Roman system, the day started at sunrise. This, we feel, is reasonable, at least in winter.

Nobody seems entirely sure why noon changed from being at 3 pm to 12 o'clock. Possibly the time for ecclesiastical services moved, or work patterns changed after the BASTARD NORMAN* invasion.

Possibly we had some toilet pictures we had intended to show you, but once we start ranting we tend to produce quite long blog posts, and we hesitate to bore or exhaust our readers. Let us therefore content ourselves with telling you the joyous news that there is, actually, official information on the sorry state of British plumbing!

We came across, via Twitter, this blog, written by an American living in Britain. The author expresses her bafflement at the perversity of British plumbing in a way that is familiar to all readers of this blog. The traditional learning curve goes:

1) WTF? Why are there two taps? Why?
2) Oh thank God, there ARE mixer taps even in this fucked-up country
3) WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL THE WATER COMING OUT OF THIS SOI-DISANT MIXER TAP IS SEPARATED SO HALF IS BOILING HOT AND HALF FREEZING COLD THIS IS TOO DIABOLICAL FOR WORDS WHY WOULD SOMEONE DO THIS
4) This is hell

A witty and intelligent illustration of said learning curve is provided in this video.
Anyway, we learned from the blog mentioned above that there is actually a leaflet from Defra, the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs, explaining the intricacies of the fucked-up-ness of British water tanks. Enjoy.

We've drunk a good litre of tea this forenoon and need to break now. But first - a festive video! We came across, via this article by Soraya Chemaly on the structural sexism affecting (the lack of) women's toilets, an excellent TED talk by the same author. We're not normally in favour of videos where people talk, preferring to read articles as this is faster and constitutes a more reasonable use of our time, but Soraya Chemaly's talk is thoughtful, intelligent, and funny, and based on solid research. We cannot recommend it enough.

*As all civilised people know, one cannot use the word "Norman" without prefixing it with the adjective "bastard".

Festive video - Soraya Chemaly, How Sexism Shapes Human Knowledge


Related Reading

The one time we saw the advantage of expressing something in Latin:
Apparently There Was a "Best Norwegian Café" and "Best Latin Translation" Competition, and Here Are the Winners!

The video illustrating the perverted monstrosity going by the name of plumbing in the British Isles: Evolution of British Plumbing

Soraya Chemaly on toilets and structural sexism:
Biology Doesn't Write Laws: Hillary Clinton's Bathroom Break Wasn't As Trivial As Some Might Like to Think

If you're a bit drunk and in the mood for something kinky and perverse:
The Defra leaflet explaining about British water tanks

The lonely hearts ad we wrote for Jonny:
Jonny and a Public Toilet - A Treat for Single Ladies

Another picture of Colin Firth in the bath:
Privy Counsel Pin-Up - Colin Firth

And another one:
It Is Tolerable, We Suppose: A Privy Counsel Pick-Me-Up


A compilation of our best rants on separate taps:

A Note on Desperate Measures
Are You British? Does Tap Sanity Elude You?
Let's Get Medieval: King's Manor, York
Mixer Taps - The Great Controversy, or, When Will Britain Enter the 21st Century?, or, You Are Not Alone!
More Dark, Dark Horrors: An Outwardly Reputable Employer with a Dark and Filthy Secret
More Uzbek Toilets
Oh! the horror! SCREAMING BLOODY HORROR HALLOWEEN SPECIAL: The British Workplace
On the Eighth Day God Created Paratroopers, But He Forgot the Soap
Right Up Our Alley
Safety at Work

Wishing All Our Readers a Towering Great New Year!

Happy New Year!

We shall keep this brief, to give you all more time for drunken revelry and orgiastic carousing, and also because sickness and ill health plague us like syphilis plagues a Romantic poet. Actually we suffer a vast deal, and have done for some time - though of course with the greatest patience in the world, which is always the way with us, for we have, without exception, the sweetest temper anyone ever met with. People often tell their other girls they are nothing to us. 

Be that as it may, we want to get back to drinking vast quantities of tea and watching old episodes of Poirot.

We have a greeting from Dragon-Hunting Friend, who says:

Happy new year from the "loo with a view" (as the lift attendant called it) - floor 68 of the Shard!

We've had some quite worrying conversations recently with Australian Friend about the Shard, and thus find this sight a trifle uncomfortable. But we hope you enjoy it!

That is quite some toilet! And with a mixer tap, too!

We don't have any new year's resolutions, though we do have two mottoes for 2016. And we mean to stick to them. They are:

FEMINISM NEEDS TO BE MORE MILITANT

and

PEOPLE SHOULD FUCK OFF MORE

We don't have a hell of a lot else to say. We meant to do a review of the year's twelve best posts, like we did last year to great acclaim. But we have the kind of headache that feels like you drank a bottle of Bailey's all by yourself, except unfortunately we didn't, or at least not recently. Also only three people have voted in the poll which we announced in our last post, with the intention of defining the twelve best posts of 2015. Clearly our readers are even more depraved than we thought they were, and don't appreciate democracy, or bog blog polls.

So that's it. Happy fucking new year!

Today's festive video is Miranda Lambert at the Grammy awards, because it is our ambition to kick one tenth of the arse she does during the year to come.

Festive video - Miranda Lambert, Little Red Wagon (57th GRAMMYs)


Now fuck off.


Related Reading

All posts featuring New Year's Eve
Feast your eyes on another loo with a view here: All Mouth and No Trousers - Sichuan Food in Singapore

A Very Wet Blog Post

We trust that everyone has had their annual Christmas bath and is now comfortable, clean, and drunk.

Now that Christmas is to all intents and purposes over and done with in all sane and normal parts of the world, we can sit back and reflect on what we have learned. If your Christmas has been anything like ours, you have been worrying about people not washing their hands properly. Insufficient handwashing, as every educated person knows, leads to the spread of cholera, typhoid, and salmonella left, right and centre. Possibly even herpes!

(By no means do we want to make our readers paranoid, of course, or hector anyone. We just wish people would stop doing things like rinsing their hands briefly (what good do they imagine that does?), and bloody well wash properly. There is a range of entertaining and informative instructional videos out there: damn well watch them.)

We received an illuminating Christmas parable from Shewee Fiend Friend yesterday. Here it is, via Shewee Fiend Friend's phone:

Yesterday I went to a Christmas fair at an English major horse [we're pretty sure that's supposed to read manor house, but the typo is too amusing to correct]
Waiting for a toilet, I see and hear a boy say to his mom, I'm just not going to wash my hands
I'm standing one foot away from both of them
Mom says ok
I say ew
No effect
In their defence, these were the most irritating taps ever
The next conversation I overheard at same sink was a little girl who definitely did want to wash her hands
Anyway girl tries to use these taps

We have no idea what is going on here. Is Shewee Fiend Friend photographing someone else washing their hands? Or did she somehow photograph her own hands? Or did she persuade someone else to take a photo of her washing her hands? And in that case, who?

Whatever is going on here, one has to admire Shewee Fiend Friend's dedication.

They only stay on when you hold them, require a lot of pressure, and are either burning hot or freezing cold
So girl suggests to mom, mom holds the tap while girl washes hands, and then girl will hold the tap while mom washes her hands
And mom says to girl, we forget we're so spoiled with our nice mixer taps at home

What a simultaneously heartwarming and spine-chilling story!

And now for something completely different. As we all know, voting is a serious business. One must never accidentally vote for a political candidate who wants to limit women's reproductive rights, cut down on support for schools, or go bananas with fossil fuels. It is thus important, when voting, to stay sober and pay attention.
But here's some good news: we've got a thing you can vote on where it's an advantage to be drunk! So have some more whisky, have a look through all of this year's 60 (so far) posts, and vote for your favourite!

If you are viewing the web version of this blog, you can see all of 2015's posts listed under "Down the pan: Blog archive", below the labels (quite far down the page).

We have helpfully listed some alternatives, but do add your own favourite post!

CLICK HERE TO VOTE!

Shewee Fiend Friend says: Christmas dinner and breakfast and every meal sorted!

Now, if you should peradventure not have access to a thick history book with many rude stories, unlike Australian Friend, who just sent us an amusing quote about the pox from Peter Ackroyd's London, don't worry! THERE IS NO NEED TO DESPAIR. We've got some holiday reading for you!

Our mysteries are generally very popular, and are especially relatable at Christmas. Moreover, this one is simultaneously a cautionary tale about what happens when you don't wash your hands properly:

A Christmas Mystery: The Mysterious Case of the Curse at Crapper Castle; or; Put a Lid on It; or; No Shit, Sherlock

Then we have, of course, our classic Poirot mystery from 2011:

The Body in the Bathtub: A Poirot Mystery

Enjoy!

Now, time for a festive video! This one comes to us from German Friend, who is busy celebrating the holidays on a southern shore.

German Friend says:

And here is your Christmas present! I can't listen to it now, I would wake up dogs and people, but I'm sure it's good. The audio is, as far as I remember, an ode to shit or something played in a loop in the Hundertwasser toilets in the Hundertwasser Haus in Vienna. Recorded July 2015. I'm sorry about the sketchy information. It's Christmas Eve 7 am, I have a hangover (from the day before yesterday) and 8,000 errands to run before starting the celebrations.

(Remember, by the way, German Friend's hectic New Year's Eve the other year?)

Festive video: German Friend, Hundertwasser Loo

All we have to add is, woof!

Related Reading

Our most hectoring handwashing post ever:
Handwashing Extravaganza

By the way, this post is from 2015 and it's pretty good:
"Drunken Routs, in Which More Things Were Broken Than Heads and Furniture, Sister!"

This one was good too:

All Mouth and No Trousers - Sichuan Food in Singapore

This one wasn't bad, either:
Cheese and Worcester

By the way, here is a summary of our main rants about non-mixer taps. You're welcome:

A Note on Desperate Measures
Are You British? Does Tap Sanity Elude You?
Let's Get Medieval: King's Manor, York
Mixer Taps - The Great Controversy, or, When Will Britain Enter the 21st Century?, or, You Are Not Alone!
More Dark, Dark Horrors: An Outwardly Reputable Employer with a Dark and Filthy Secret
More Uzbek Toilets
Oh! the horror! SCREAMING BLOODY HORROR HALLOWEEN SPECIAL: The British Workplace
On the Eighth Day God Created Paratroopers, But He Forgot the Soap
Right Up Our Alley
Safety at Work

Balls! It's Christmas!

It is Christmas Eve! The day on which Christmas is celebrated in all right-thinking countries*, including Scandiwegia, Germany, Poland, Portugal, and Colombia!

We've got Christmas greetings from Uncle Sean, in the shape of some weird toilet pictures and a charming rhyme:

Here for [Christmas] a display of reflective art, far more preferable than a boom bounding ______. 

Eerie scenes to beautify the loo, far more appealing than that un-flushed ______.

Wasn't that refreshing? We do love the spoken and written word!

Next - behold these creepy toilet pictures! They appear to be full of spirits, and are therefore totally in keeping with the atmosphere at the Privy Counsel right now.

We don't actually know what is happening here.

Or here.

Not here either.

Nope.

We also have a Christmas greeting from Jonny. That charming young ne'er-do-well says,

It's annoying how cute I look as a ‪#‎hipstersanta‬.

Jonny as hipster Santa.

 Do you agree, readers?

(Jonny is still single, by the way, despite being very popular with the type of wanton female who frequents this blog. If you find his rugged charms irresistible even after reading this lonely-hearts ad that we wrote for him a couple of years ago, do get in touch. Help us help our favourite bachelor to haul ass into human bondage!)

Another thing, before we bugger off to drink ourselves insensible and watch bad telly enjoy the wonders of Christmas. We have created a poll! In which you can vote! The thing you can vote for is not, unfortunately, "the cutting off of the hands of people who don't wash their hands when they've been to the toilet", "the locking up into damp prisons of people who make themselves guilty of mansplaining", or even "the obligatory inclusion of rum and Richard Armitage to all parties held at the Privy Counsel", but the twelve best bog blog posts of 2015!

Have a think: which Privy Counsel post did you enjoy most this year? Which was the most informative? Or most mindbogglingly horror-filled? Have three or four large glasses of whisky, and GET VOTING!

We have included some helpful suggestions of posts you can vote for, but you can add your own favourite candidate:

CLICK HERE TO VOTE!

(Please note that you can only vote once. So have lots of whisky, and think carefully.)

Today's festive video is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "We should all be feminists" speech. It is longer than our usual festive videos, but then what is Christmas for, if not to get slowly woozy on one's favourite drink, read large works of history, and listen to the wise words of someone you admire?
Listen to this, and enjoy Ngozi Adichie's beautiful voice, dry humour, and dazzling wit!
Gaaah, we bloody love this woman!

Festive video - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We should all be feminists

*Please note that we joyously embrace the notion of not celebrating Christmas at all, or only including the pagan aspects, like drinking and eating too much, worshipping the sun, and/or having orgies.

Related reading

All posts featuring Christmas
Al posts featuring the concept of gender equality
All posts featuring Uncle Sean
All posts featuring Jonny

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