Literary Cubicles

I am not nearly as well read as I would like to be. I attribute this to having a fully functioning digestive system that means that trips to the lavatory are kept to a largely sensible and minimal number. Allow me to elaborate. And please excuse my short attention span on any one train of thought.

As many men know, there can be few pleasures in life better than sitting on the toilet reading a good book. Or failing that, a simple magazine or newspaper. I think that may be one of the unfortunate failings of blogs, that this essential opportunity to scream to the reading public is not captured by the medium. Perhaps drilling a small hole in the bathroom door, inserting an ethernet cable, and riding the throne with a laptop pressed against your lap might be an art worth pursuing, though I fear it may not be the grail it appears at first glance. That image would make a great sculpture to be placed in front of Microsoft headquarters or the like.

The choice of reading material does not seem to matter much, it is merely a means to achieving inner peace and sancitity whilst seated upon the porcelain throne, idly wiling away the hours, lost in the simple beauty of sentences or merely allowing the mind to ramble and slosh like the water from a bloated river in an abandoned sitting room after heavy rainfall in an over-developed flood plain.

Now, I know better than to pick at the untidy seam that stitches the two genders together into what we so aptly call the human race. I say this, but I would not be averse to watching a live televised all-out cage fight between Jeremy Clarkson and Germaine Greer. I imagine the sheer level of mauling would be spectacular, and that there would be some pretty informed and witty commentary from the participants themselves, with the slapstick enlivened by the use of props like a wrenched-off speed camera from Mr Clarkson, and a hardback copy of one of her best-selling books from Ms Greer. Alan Hanson could commentate to give that added bit of cynical zest. Sorry about that, back to the point at hand. Despite my fence-sitting stance, I would have to rule that our toilet-reading nature is one of the fundamental differences between us.

Worthy experience has shown that there is no better way to avoid having to sit in front of Ugly Betty double-bill of an evening, as your soul slowly implodes itself using a really hard-to-reach self-destruct button, and as one of your manically twitching eyes shifts over to catch a glance at the Argos catalogue on the floor, allowing your brain to wonder into a fantasy kingdom where it considers whether ingesting a thousand-page catalogue sideways would actually be fatal. At this point, your eyes normally give up and swivel into the back of your head from the lethal infusion of primary colours emanating from the screen and drilling through your frontal lobes and then you collapse. And then your number is really up. Because no on else is budging to help you until the remaining 55 minutes of the televisual feast is over. And then they can watch it all over again on the “+1” channel to catch some more of the bitter wit and peppy dialogue apparently so rampant in the modelling industry. Err, yes I have watched it. Someone was using the shower. But as no lesser genius of a hero than Father Ted once said of television, “chewing gum for the eyes.” Lock yourself in the bathroom instead and weep into something by Albert Camus.

“But, Mr Anything For Then, you appear to be using this flimsy concept in a really half-arsed way as the entire basis for some post-structuralist discourse about the separating nature that our reading habits have on the unity of inter-gender relations. And that is a crap name for a blog by the way.” Firstly, I don’t know what you mean with your fancy words, and secondly, I know this, the name happened by accident.

So let’s go slightly deeper. Always a difficult and dangerous thing to do when talking about toilets, but bring a torch and we’ll be fine. Why indeed does the humble bathroom seem like the only place of total isolation left? Someone once said that an Englishman’s home is his castle. Let’s forget for a moment that most people aren’t English and that this quote was possibly the opinion of a colonial-minded right-winger who wished that he could hark back to the vainglorious days of the nineteenth century when the globe was blotted with red from all the vast dominions this small island had conquered, using nothing more than beads, mirrors and a nuclear submarine or two (according to my sources). And also try to forget whether this quote applies to bedsits. I vaguely recall watching interviews with recently arrived Asians who had been expelled from Uganda by illustrious King of the Fishes in the Sea and All Other Madness, Idi Amin, where they recounted the trip from Gatwick Airport by train through south London. They had all been genuinely shocked by the smallness of those soot-stained brick terraces in which the majority of these castle-minded Englishmen seemed to reside.

It’s funny the images that get exported, but how, in the intervening period, has this mind-castle diminished to a water closet? Is it that life now has such a stranglehold on us with its muddy gloves around our neck that the only place of true privacy is an act that, so far, technology has been unable to supersede? Or has this phenomenon been around for ages? And what, more importantly, is the female equivalent of toilet-reading? I don’t know any of these things, I just like asking questions. It lands you a few bruises in the face but occasionally you get an answer. If you were around in the seventeenth century though, and are an avid-reading male who liked nothing than to squat over the latrine with a copy of the latest parchment issue of Plague News, or you have the answer to the female-equivalent-question then I really would like to hear from you.

To get back to an earlier suggestion, I suspect that all this progress and intrusion might be the very reason that we must never drill a hole in the bathroom door and lead the internet inside. To be shut off from the world must sometimes be necessary, and allowing the demon of technology, which I am ironically trying to harness to my own ends, to access this one final place of security and isolation, is to drown a concept worth keeping. Just let us have it a little while longer before we have to upload our waste products via USB to the online Bazalgette network where it can be recycled into scripts for daytime televisual output.

Still, to those uninitiated to this great pastime, here are a few of the things you are missing out on, and bear in mind that you do not have to do much actual reading while you’re in there, you can merely use the reading material as an excuse for the below:

1 - Time to just stop.
2 - Time to ponder the meaning of life, and possibly even get round to reading the cover jacket of that book you have got a hundred pages into without understanding.
3 - Time to ponder how long that spider’s web has been up there, and why almost all cobwebs seem empty. Have they been reposessed by ruthless web-lenders and are they now living on the street under thimbles? And how does a loan shark get far enough ashore to challenge a spider’s mortgage payments anyway?
4 - The opportunity to avoid aforementioned death by Ugly Betty.
5 - If in a public toilet cubicle, time to read some of the magnificent grafitti. I don’t mean the ‘cock fun’ phone numbers, but gems such as, “Everyone pees on the floor, be a hero and shit on the ceiling.”
6 - Time to think up an itinerary for your Saturday to get out of that trip to the Farmer’s Market.
7 - Time to think of more things to put in a list like this.

But enough, I feel you have been subjected to enough of this nonsense today. I’m off to the out-house to catch up on some good old-fashioned paper reading. Besides which, my ethernet cable doesn’t reach that far.