Toilet Rolls

I have always felt that it should be possible to devise a question which would enable the country to be divided roughly in half, but with absolute precision as to the camp to which you belong.

For example “Are you a cat person or a dog person” works quite well, but there remain hardcore elements who love or hate each equally.

Personally I believe “In Paul Ableman’s Green Julia do you identify with Bob or Jake?” is a brilliant distinguisher, but regrettably it only distinguishes within the tiny subset of people who have read the work concerned.

But at last I thought I had the solution. “Do you prefer the toilet roll to be inserted onto the roller so that the loose end hangs forward over the top of the roll, or straight down behind?” Actually I doubt if the word ‘prefer’ does justice to feelings on this subject. More accurate might be: “Do you insist that whatever else happens in the universe, at least the toilet roll should be ….?”

Given that I regard myself as a reasonably tolerant person, it alarms me how angry it makes me to be a captive in a room where it has not been hung correctly. (Forward over, of course! It irks me that you should even ask.)

It appears however that there must be a few waverers or peacemakers in the world who actually avoid the problem by not using a roller. When I was a child the mother of two of my friends hosted every week the Methodist Ladies’ Knitting Circle. Week in, week out, come sun, come rain, come Suez, come Cuba, they sat and knitted, in a Wesleyan manner and a variety of colours, identical objects – vaguely cylindrical, with a small hole at the top and a large one at the bottom. For months I had no concept of what they might be, until one day I saw one with the top half of a plastic doll stuffed into the smaller hole, making the cylinder into a long dress. I turned it upside down and looked up the dress. Somewhere in the world is probably a ten year old boy who wouldn’t automatically do that, but I have yet to meet him. There were no legs. This did not so much solve the mystery as intensify it. The resolution came only on the day of the Methodist Ladies’ Knitting Circle Bring and Buy Sale. There on a trestle table, as though a bizarre Wargaming club had been influenced by Claes Oldenberg’s soft sculptures, was ranged a regiment of dressed doll torsos. One (for illustrative purposes only; tissue not included) sat demurely on top of a roll of toilet paper. There, in a single room, were enough toilet roll cozies to supply every toilet in the village with a fresh change for every day of the week.

I am of course aware that there is another major dichotomy in society regarding the smallest room, and that is what to call it. I have almost certainly already alienated much of my audience by referring to toilet rolls rather than loo rolls.

I was as a student appointed to our school council, a toothless body whose main privilege was to elect the sub-prefects. Or so we were told. Given the number of total bastards who seemed to get the job either a lot of councilors were open to corruption, or the staff just tore up the results and picked whom they wanted. Goodness knows, even I got elected at one point, and I never met anyone who had voted for me. Anyway, I soon gave it up on a point of very deep principle: the principle being that I’d never wanted the job in the first place.

However as well as our psephological activities, we occasionally had our opinions ignored on questions such as school uniform and alternative sports activities; and the state of the school toilets. At my first meeting the members were well into this last topic when the Head, who up until this point had given a good impression, if impression it was, of being asleep, suddenly jumped up and shouted, “There are no toilets in this school!” Some started to worry about his sanity. Others of us started to wonder what exactly it was that we had been urinating on throughout our school careers. After a long embarrassing silence he decided to elucidate: “There are only lavatories.” And so came my first experience of some people’s obsession with the nomenclature. Actually I thought we had done really well to call them toilets, since none of us would ever anywhere else in school have called them anything but The Bogs. I am sure any reader from the younger generation will now be saying, “Ok, Smartypants. So when you wanted a wee you asked the teacher if you could go to The Bogs, did you?” Of course we didn’t. We never asked. In the most unlikely event of the request being granted (only the newest and softest teachers would have even considered the proposal) the humiliation would have been too great to bear; there was every chance of spending the whole of your remaining school career being yclept Weakbladder.

Only in Primary School did we go to the toilet in lesson time. There, of course, you had to put up your hand and ask. I was taken aside by a teacher who explained all this to me after my first few days at school during which time I had on several occasions got up and walked out with the immortal words, “I won’t be long.” The teacher was clearly a very busy woman and I didn’t want to disturb her.  Besides, it’s what I did at home. Actually I thought I had done well to choose that phrase rather than the other one which I used domestically, in those days of outdoor privies, “I’m just going up the garden.” But the teacher told me to ask, “Please may I go to the toilet?” and toilet it remained with me.

What else do I find in the toilet to make me whinge? When someone has got the two plys of the two ply tissue out of sync and so the perforations don’t work. This is the fault of the manufacturers for sticking down the end of the roll. What useful function can this possibly serve?