As Sheila, Jae and Oscar get ready to fly off later today for their adventure on the slopes of Kilmanjaro, I find I have been thinking of toilets a lot. As well as reading about them in Sheila’s blog posts, I seem to be seeing little articles in papers and magazines. Apparently almost forty per cent of people travelling on holiday worry about finding toilets en route and there – and even more then worry about the possible absence of loo paper. At least Sheila, Jae and Oscar know that there will be toilet tents on their holiday.
All this got me thinking about my various holidays; recently I saw some indoor toilets, with running water, amidst the ruins of Ancient Greece. Some years earlier I had to chuckle at the chumminess of the communal, running water latrines in ancient Rome. I wonder how many deals were settled over a communal evacuation?
So I began to think that the availability of decent toilet facilities had to be an indicator of civilisation. In that case, Japan must be the most civilised country in the world with their amazing Toto toilets. They have little jets that can wash you back or front; some even have a jet of hot air to dry you. Think of it, going to the loo for a wash and blow dry! Beside each Toto there is a control panel with which you can set the temperature of the heated seat, chose the temperature and pressure of the various jets – some even play music to cover the rude noises one might make. My mind ran riot over the choice of music – ‘Music for the Royal Fireworks’ or the ‘Trout Quintet’.
Then memories of China killed that theory. For centuries before their Revolution, China was a heavily structured and civilised society (if you can forget the conditions under which ordinary people lived). However their toilet arrangements were far from advanced. Rich and poor alike used chamber pots and the poor paid the rich for the privilege of collecting the contents each day to spread on their fields. Read Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer Prize winning ‘The Good Earth’ in which Mrs Buck describes the indignity of a child walking round with a gradually filling up container of slops on their backs, with a piece of sacking tucked round the neck to try to stop things sloshing down their neck. Yes, I know, too much information! With that within human memory, maybe that explains why the Chinese are not squeamish about smelly toilets. I wonder what excuse the French, another very civilised country, has? And then the Chinese take sharing to extremes – like public ladies toilets with no doors – and squat toilets.
In Southern Africa, where so many poor people live in shanty towns without sanitation, the authorities have put in blocks of porta-loos such as we have at big outdoor events. I saw several blocks carefully painted, a letter on each cubicle, reading ‘dehumanising’. Our guide said that many of the residents were used to living in wide, open spaces where heat and insects rapidly recycled waste. It’s the same in India where, despite the authorities putting communal toilet blocks in the poorer areas of towns, people still prefer to keep up their old practice of ‘fertilising the soil’ – even if it is no more than going behind the bushes by the roadside.
But it doesn’t do to be smug about primitive toilet arrangements. Even closer to my home near Edinburgh, we weren’t that civilised. A couple of hundred years ago, Edinburgh was fondly called Auld Reekie. Reek means smelly, but chimneys also reek smoke. The twee people of Edinburgh (and there are plenty of those) still insist that Reekie was a reference to the smoke, while other know full well that it was the smell of waste in the streets. In the Old Town of Edinburgh, with its insanitary ancient buildings people were allowed to throw their waste into the streets for one hour each evening, after which a sweeper would clear the detritus for sale to farmers in the surrounding land. The residents were obliged to shout a warning to any person who may have chosen to walk the fragrant streets. This warning was “Gardyloo”, a corruption of the French ‘beware of water’ – and whatever else. These days are over, thank goodness. But the call lived on until the end of the twentieth century, if somewhat ironically. After Edinburgh modernised, they had sewage pipes with a fairly inadequate sewage treatment facility. The ‘treatment plant’ was on the edge of the Firth of Forth, into which the liquid waste was released. The sludge was another easily solved problem; a specially constructed ship, grandly named MV Gardyloo left each day with its cargo of sludge to deposit it in the North Sea.
A trip on the Gardyloo actually became a fairly popular tourist attraction – maybe not for the type of people who are flowing into Edinburgh for the International, Fringe and Book festivals at present. And the Chinese practice continued in rural parts of Scotland well into the twentieth century. An elderly friend remembers when he was about ten, his Grandmother was given, by her brother, a bag full of giant, prizewinning vegetables that had won all the prizes at the local show. Back home from the show Charlie was sent to put the vegetables in the dustbin – his grandmother’s explanation was that she knew where her brother emptied his chamber pot. Charlie chuckled as he said they would now be sold as ‘Organic’.
So what is ahead of the happy trio on the toilet front? One thing I was worried about was that, in keeping with the Kili principle of what goes up must come down, porters would carry the toilet contents uphill and down with the gang having to walk behind the ‘toilet’ porters; I remember how embarrassed our dogs used to be walking behind us as we gently (always gently) swung the little bag of poo. Sheila has reassured me that the ‘contents’ get buried.
And with that, what more can I do but to wish Sheila, Jae and Oscar a remarkable, memorable and enjoyable experience. Best wishes and love.