(~4 minutes to read)

I’m old enough to have lived in a house with “outdoor plumbing”. That, by the way, is a euphemism for an outdoor toilet. In my case, it was a flush toilet with a tank on the wall near the ceiling and a chain-pull to flush, and it connected to the municipal sewer network. Many have lived with outhouses as their only port of call; some still do.

(And here, I should emphasize that my discussion is limited to so-called “civilization”—I acknowledge the sorry state of sanitation in many parts of the world, but this piece is about the other parts.)

I’m also old enough to remember that a visit to the toilet was a matter-of-fact affair—I went; I sat; I went; I rose; I flushed; I exited; I returned. Life was simple.

But modernity required that toilets be located indoors where their convenience is enhanced. After all, you don’t have to dress for the weather to spend a penny.

Raising a Stink Indoors

But indoors, the thunderbox is within earshot—and nosewaft—of other parts of the house. Big business (pardon the unintentional pun) has trained most of us to be aware of—and ashamed of—any aroma other than that of roses (or fresh-cut pine or freesia or fresh linen) emanating from the smallest room in the house, so society has trained itself to avoid or minimize such social faux pas.

We turn the (extractor) fan on as we enter.

We check to see if there’s any air freshener on display.

If it’s number twos we’re being compelled to deposit, we might be relieved if we see a bottle of “Poo Pourri” (or one of its competitors) available. We might also check for the availability of a toilet brush.

We men tinkle on the porcelain rather than into the water below, to minimize sounds that might cause listeners to build a mental image. (This, by the way, might explain why some men are unable to limit their tinklings to the interior of the toilet bowl.)

If wind/gas is seeking an exit, we contrive to make it as noiseless as possible.

We may linger longer in order that the extractor fan be given time to fulfil its purpose. (But those who don’t flush before lingering need to know that their waiting is in vain.)

We pray that nobody’s waiting to use the dunny straight after us.

And this all gets magnified/amplified when we consider the prospect of using the facilities at school, at work, or even in a shopping mall.

Why?

Why do we care so much?

Every last one of us has to eliminate the by-products and waste from the things we pour in at the top end. As Scotty says in Star Trek, “Ye canna beat the laws of physics”. Yet we seem to pretend that we don’t do such things.

Even the words that people used in polite company to describe the what and where are no longer considered appropriate, and we’re generally uncomfortable with the whole concept of “having to go” when we’re outside our own homes.

Take this extract from Samuel Pepys’ diary for January 28th, 1666:

“At Brainford I ‘light, having need to s**t, and went into an Inne doore that stood open, found the house of office and used it…”

The asterisks are mine, not Pepys’.

Here, Pepys uses what, today, is considered a bad, bad word to describe what he needed to do, but uses the delightful euphemism “house of office” to identify the latrine or toilet to which he retired. I would therefore speculate that the “s” word was the socially acceptable word of Pepys’ day.

But the subject of terminology is a whole different… subject, so we’ll move on.

The point I was trying to make is that social conventions (and air freshener manufacturers) have conditioned us to avoid letting others into our dirty little secret that we wiz and poop, so we make ourselves uncomfortable (at the very least) trying to preserve that secret.

I once knew a person who would refrain from doing twosies at all when away from home. If they stayed with us for a night or two, that person would “bottle it up” (figuratively, I hasten to add) and wait until they reached the privacy of their own loo.

I’m forced to ask myself if these uptight, self-conscious conventions would have come about if the lavvy had stayed outside. After all, ventilation was not a problem (as far as odour imprisonment was concerned anyway), and any sound effects were witnessed only by the birds in the back yard.

But if we returned to dumping al fresco, we’d re-inherit all the disadvantages. An outside convenience isn’t very… convenient when it’s dark outside, or cold, or raining, or snowing. And with no yard light (or toilet light), spending a penny is something you think very carefully about as a kid. My brother and I had a chamber pot in our bedroom to get around the need to run the gauntlet of the backyard bogey man. Number ones would be deposited in the “gazunder” (so-called because it “goes under” the bed), but number twos still necessitated the bogeyman trip. One therefore learned to keep oneself “regular”.

I’m pretty sure that advocating for the banishment of the porcelain throne to the outdoors is an exercise in futility. So until we learn to accept our bodily functions as normal (or until geneticists come up with an alternative to them), I guess we’ll continue to perform those gastro-intestinal feats of strength and acrobatics that convention demands.

Me; I’m off to the rest room to spend a penny, powder my nose, make myself comfy, and generally avail myself of the facilities offered by the house of office.