Bog standards
Oxford has long been fascinated by its toilets. A poem, written in Latin and slipped into the back of an ancient copy of Utopia in the New College library, is testament to this. Written in 1633, it charts all the various events of note to have occurred at the college over the previous fifteen years, and a new set of toilets is one of the main causes of joy for the writer.
Centuries on, the creation of that strange thing, the OFS twobicle, containing not one, but two toilets in a super-sized compartment — although funnily enough, only one loo roll holder — shows that Oxford has not lost its urge for invention in the bathroom, and led me to wonder what else might be lurking in the bowels of the city. Intrigued by what I might find, I pulled in a couple of similarly puzzled friends, and embarked upon what is perhaps Oxford’s first (intentional) loo crawl.
Bar crawls, you know, are simply so passé, and, as anyone who has ever attended a Long Room party will understand, all the best people end up spending most of the night in the loos anyway. Which, when one considers the toilets beneath New’s famous Long Room, seems perfectly reasonable.
The atmosphere is calm, the lighting effective and, as long as one avoids looking in the mirrors over the sink — go for the one on the other wall instead, if you want to see yourself looking at least vaguely human — a pleasant time may be had by all. So impressive, indeed, are the Long Room’s facilities, that they have a devoted little band of female followers, who religiously make the trip out there at least three times during every bop.
Although this may at least be partly thanks to the fact that anyone attempting to use the girls’ loos at the bar may want to take out a life insurance policy first, the builders not seeming to have realised that cramped, twisting stairs, high heels and alcohol make something of a lethal combination. Over the garden wall in Teddy Hall, we discover that here at least, boys and girls have to put up with exactly the same facilities: the loos are unisex.
They are also metal, the whole place having the air of an industrial style kitchen, although with something of a less appetizing smell. We quickly head back upstairs and into the fresh air of the graveyard that surrounds the converted church that is Teddy Hall’s library, only to have to beat something of a sharp retreat when it looks like we are about to get squashed by a triumphant gang of rowers.
They suddenly appear from nowhere, bearing a massive boat on their shoulders like a battering ram. Apparently they are going to burn it in the front quad. We leave them to their rowing chants and arguments about whether such an action breaks the college’s newly implemented no-smoking policy, and escape to the quieter surroundings of Merton.
Visiting the loos here, we enter a 1930s style oasis: a calm, sophisticated little place that makes one expect to find Poirot bent over the body of an elegantly dressed woman with a missing string of pearls and a bullet through the head, slumped over the sinks. And the huge, full length mirror is a definite plus. Having congratulated one another on our find, we head up towards St John’s, only to face yet more disappointment.
No metal here, but a thin, tight staircase reminiscent of New’s, with a cramped little compartment that does not even have any interesting graffiti to reward you for your efforts. The ladies may have slightly less to interest them at the Rad Cam now they have given it a bit of a paint job, but the boys can still amuse themselves with limericks about doctors of divinity and their virginal daughters.
The English Faculty is home to a rather more academic discussion. In amongst the Runes and Elvish sentences that decorate the end cubicle of the girls’ loos there, is a sprawling debate sparked off by the comment: “Don’t worry second years."
Controversy reigns over whether there should be a comma after the “worry”, or whether the concerned writer was asking other students not to harass the middle year — if the author is reading, perhaps they could clarify the point and thus end a long running debate which has since turned into an argument over the problems of the descriptive versus the prescriptive in English lexicography. Loo graffiti may hold also hold the key to something more than essays on dictionaries.
Perusing the Latin inscriptions on the door of a cubicle at the King’s Arms, my friend and I were interrupted by an innocent pubgoer. Waiting, as I thought, for her to enter another cubicle, my surprise at her attempting to go into the one I had just vacated was great, although not as great as hers when she discovered the compartment was still occupied. Perhaps the inventor of the twobicle experienced a similar misunderstanding.
8th Jun 2006