9th July

Bored at home. Waiting for news.

Saw a website the other day in which a Tokyo resident, keen to fulfil his civic obligations, constructed a website mapping and reviewing toilets in around Tokyo.

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~AD8y-HYS/index_e.htm

It’s written in broken English; appropriate considering most of the toilets are also trashed. He takes pictures of them all, regardless of the contents of the pan.

Started thinking about squat toilets. Apparently, many public toilets in Japan take this form.

I have used a squat toilet only once, and I was in Latvia and it wasn’t successful.

On the way in, a leathery old babooshka wrapped in a shawl sat behind a little window handing out the toilet paper, and so I immediately I had to start thinking about how many sheets the activity was to require.

Someone should invent a formula for this. How about:


F = volatility of last meal x time spent holding it in
absorbency/quality of toilet paper


I was fully expecting a typical Armitage Shanks sit-down toilet, but on entering, was greeted with a rectangle of cracked, grey porcelain sat flush (pun absolutely intended) to the floor, like toppled-over tombstone. Appropriate, because a little piece of me was about to die.

I stared at it for a while and wondered how this was all to fit together. Initially, I tried to simply sit on my haunches, but this was murder on the knees and I was aware that my pants were positioned precariously: stretched between my ankles, like a high-tensile safety net waiting to catch acrobats falling from a high-wire.

Adapt, improve and innovate, I thought, and so leaned over until the crown of my head came to rest on the opposing wall. And, with my hands pushing down on the tops of my thighs, I gingerly completed my task.

Don’t know why I chose to write that up. I told you I was bored.