Bog standards
Shit. What's a journalist to do? What brave new frontier is there left to cross in Oxford life? 'Fear and loathing in the lower Rad Cam' - get the Park and Ride into town at 9am, set for a 0th week of unparalleled, 24/7 debauchery among every book ever written (hey, like cool man). Only to have your plans thwarted by an extra from Cell Block H madly ringing a bell at 9.48pm each evening. I get the impression drinking liquid ether might be frowned upon too.
Perhaps I'm not the only person to be a bit jealous of restaurant columnists. Eating posh food and writing about how much I value myself always seemed a nice option. Getting paid for it makes it a much better bet for boosting your sense of self worth than years of psychotherapy. Perhaps this is the solution to the NHS cash crisis. Having thousands of long stay psychotics reviewing hospital food probably wouldn't be quite the same, though.
Anyhow, new adventures in wildlife with Mr Mehdi and his friends is so last year. For 2001, it's back to basics. I'm going to review Oxford's public lavatories. Face it, its public service journalism at it's best. Accessible, relevant and useful to 100% of our target audience, all of whom (I'm assured) experience the need to defecate at least once a term.
A sceptic might say there's no need for this column. After all, if you've gotta go, you've gotta go, even if rim deposits would provide a good guide to how King Alfred cooked his cakes.
But I say take a discerning approach to dumping. As Radio 1's Exam Essentials tell us (and woe to those ignore the advice of the employers of such intellectual giants as Chris Moyles), "take a short break after every hour of revision". Why not get out of that library and take a walk to the nearest public convenience. Get a wider view of life. Where else but your local pissoir do you find such a confluence of social, gender and cultural influences?
But with exam time in mind, my first choice is the facility on Market Street, just outside (you guessed it) the Covered Market. Five minutes walk from the Bod, but another world entirely. Stepping through the door, you can tell you're in townie territory. A proudly mounted plaque by the basins tells us that this is a "Free toilet from the City of Oxford".
Equal prominence is given to a sign "Paper towel provided here". To which someone, almost witty enough to write a column all of his own, has added the observation "not". Which the toilet attendants have been more than happy to comply with.
However, what really caught my connoisseur's eye was the novel design of the lavatory seats. Two narrow, lightly textured, strips of plastic were affixed to the top of the bowl, taking the place of any conventional lavatory seat. One simple question: why?
What went through the mind of the designer? Was he concerned that a lifting toilet seat would be too easy to steal? Was he worried that it might be left up, leading to an icy encounter for the unwary? Was he worried it might be left down, users would overshoot, and.... Or did he have some bizarre fetish for his flabby thighs spilling over for a piquant encounter with the declasse, once virginal, china?
With increasingly disturbing images filling my head, I decided it was definitely time to beat a retreat.
If you are braver than I was, just one last word of warning. Bronco toilet paper. That hard, shiny stuff, designed for minimum adherence and absorption. The frankly revolting advertising slogan "Bronco for the bigger wipe". The confining of which to all but the dingiest corners of this sceptred isle might be considered the greatest achievement of post war Britain. And the cause of terminal imperial decline.
26th Apr 2001