Toilet Humour

Apparently, we shouldn't be making fun of people with a phobia about toilets. So say mental health activists, anyway. Well, it was news to me that we were making fun of them. Have I missed something? Is there an entire genre of comedy which has passed me by? Are there entire websites out there devoted to mocking those afflicted with toilet phobia? You know the sort of thing - animated toilets chasing terrified looking dudes with their trousers around their ankles. If you know of any such sites, let me know. Of course, all of this begs the question, what, exactly, constitutes a toilet phobia? Are we talking here about people who are so terrified of falling in the toilet and drowning, that they'd rather shit in their airing cupboards or hang their arses out of the bathroom window to take a dump? (Of course, both of those alternatives have the added bonus of leaving your toilet free of skid marks and smelling fresh). Maybe they view the toilet as an evil monster, just waiting to eat them, or perhaps they simply had a bad toilet experience when young which resulted in traumatic stress disorder, resulting in horrendous flashbacks every time they approach a crapper. Could it be that their phobia is based on the idea that the toilet encourages you to crap indoors, which is obviously unhygienic? Perhaps that's it - the toilet is the devil's work, another manifestation of original sin! Using it an admission that we are ashamed of defecating outdoors, in public, just as Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Edenl before they ate the forbidden fruit (which probably gave them the trots...).

Once again, I've digressed somewhat. Getting back to the point, As I understand it, the toilet phobics in question are those people who are afraid to use public toilets. And who could blame them? Have you seen the state of many of our municipal crappers? I certainly wouldn't park my bum on most of them. Quite apart from the disgusting state of their pans (frequently still full of someone else's crap - haven't you bastards ever heard of flushing?), there's also the question of the piss on the seats and the highly suspect substances smeared on the cubicle walls. I especially object to the latter as it tends to obscure the graffiti, some of which is truly astonishing in the psychoses on the part of the authors it reveals. In fact, some of the graffiti, whilst obscenely entertaining, is so disturbing that I find myself fearing that the axe murderer who wrote it might return, chopper in hand, to wreak havoc on the toilet whilst I'm sat there.

However, we really shouldn't be surprised at the state some people leave public toilets in, when their private toilet habits are, if anything, even more disgusting. My day job has taken me into some of this part of England's most disgusting domiciles and, believe me, some of the things I've seen in and around their toilets would make your hair stand on end. A couple of examples will suffice. In one recent incident I found a toilet full to the rim of the bowl with excrement. It clearly hadn't been flushed in weeks and to use it you'd have to crouch on the rim of the bowl, with your arse held high. There was a shovel beside it which, I assume, had been used to level off the shit so as to keep it at rim level. The other example comes from a few years ago when, during the height of summer, I had to enter a flat where the former tenant had broken his toilet and had instead been peeing into two and three litre coke bottles. I estimated that there were upward of fifty litres of piss in that place. A couple of full bottles, their caps removed, were stood proudly on the dining room table, clouds of flies buzzing around them. I ask you, why didn't he just pour it down the sink? Why stack cupboards full of bottles of your own piss? In fact, why not just get the toilet repaired? Of course, if he'd drunk that much coke to get the empty bottles, it's no wonder he was pissing so much... I was told later that a bucket full of shit had been found out on the balcony. Dirty bastard.

But, yet again, I have digressed. That's twice in one post. The point I'm groping toward is that if people weren't taking the piss (if you'll excuse the joke) out of toilet phobics before - mainly because nobody really knew they existed - they sure as hell will be now that this plea to stop mocking them has hit the press. Typical do-gooders, you see. If they'd just kept their traps shut instead of rushing to right a perceived wrong, nobody would have been any the wise. And we'd have been denied a rich new source of toilet humour.