Out of the way

Travelling broadens the mind, they say. (In my case, travelling is starting to broaden my waist, which I take as a sign of reaching my middle years. May they be many...). "They", as so often when they are saying things, are clearly right. One aspect of going to a new place always fascinates me:

How does the bathroom work?

I grew up in a middle-class house in Australia. The toilet was inside (because Australia had become prosperous) and the cistern flushed by pressing a button. You wiped your bottom when appropriate, and held your hands under the cold tap to wash them. When you turned on the shower, you turned the cold tap on first, then the hot tap, so as not to burn yourself. More likely, you had a bath, where you began with cold water, then hot, until it was too hot, then enough cold so you could get into it.

At Dad's office, and at some people's houses, the lavatory didn't have a button, but a chain, that you pulled. Usually, those sort of lavatories were outside the back door. And then I went to the big school (i.e. I graduated from kindergarten), and found that in the boys' toilets people would just wee at a piece of metal with yellow lumps like soap in the bottom near the plug, which had a button on the wall.

And thus I discovered that all bathrooms were not created equal.

Later, when we had a farm, I learned about the virtues of the longdrop being situated away from the house (and the drop being long), because before the digging of the first one we had a 4-gallon drum on which the seat was placed, and it got unpleasant very quickly, which was followed by an odd arrangement based on a plastic bag being suspended under the seat, a little like a comfortable version of today's doggie bags. Going camping I discovered that while we got a spade and a roll of loo paper, other people had caravans and little chemical toilets, although I never worked out exactly how they worked (and to this day I am inclined to trust to the spade instead). And instead of a filling the biggest tub you can find with water, you could hang a black bag in the sun for a hot shower.

In the cities, especially as I visited more of them, I found a whole new range of possibilities. By the time I was ten I had enountered single faucets (although I had not yet learned the word) with two taps, or with a lever that controlled both flow and temperature. I had found showers with a single tap, that apparently just increased the temperature and flow together. I had come across the squatting pan in its modern hotel setting, and the japanese bath that one entered only after washing, where the water wasn't emptied out between each use.

I learned, early on in my school career, about the communal showers we used after Phys.Ed. classes and playing sports, and later I discovered that there were communal baths. And I discovered that people had showers that instead of being fixed to the ceiling, or even the wall, like modern shower heads, were just things to hold in your hand, at the end of a hose, which you could move around. I had grasped the idea behind the unisex seat, with a gap in the front, and even seen (but not began to understand) bidets - those strange european things...

My second decade, where I learned so many other things, didn't expand my horizons much on this front. I learned to run a siphon from the creek myself, and to put a copper coil on a fire and vary the temperature by changing the flow rate. I discovered how to make a hot water system on a fire, where adding cold water via a pipe to the bottom forced out hot water from the top (and used this to enjoy a long bath by a creek, with a view down miles of valley).

I discovered that standing closer to the shower head made a real difference to how much the water cooled before it struck me, as did removing the shower head so the water came in a flow rather than being dispersed into droplets. I discovered the joy of a long hot shower, or relaxing in the bath after hard physical work. And I learned to have a "bird-bath", using a minimal amount of water for washing - something that was especially worthwhile when the water was almost frozen anyway.

(I also learned about nappies, about the nightmarish quantity of disposable diapers disposed of, and how sewerage systems really work. And why girls don't like boys who don't like showers, how much it hurts getting flicked with the tip of a wet towel, about the amazing diversity of people's bodies and their feelings about other people seeing them, especially in that awkward teenage growing-up period, and a bit about bullying. But it's sort of tangential to the topic).

In my twenties most of this knowledge just sat in my head. I made longdrops, planned and installed simple sewerage systems, discovered that the nappy issue arose for the old as well as the young (why did it take me so long to figure that out?), and used bathrooms. I learned about how to use a bidet properly (and improperly) and why people did. I had the impression that the outside dunny and the chain-pull cistern were going the way of the giant wombat, and it seemed that while the arrangements for taps grew ever-more diverse, the throne itself was being relentlessly standardised.

On the other hand I spent many hours cleaning bathrooms open to some section or other of the public, especially in swimming pools and in pubs and clubs of various kinds, and the diversity of what gets left behind can no longer shock me.

It was in my later twenties that I began to travel in earnest (the travelling that I have been doing ever since). And then I discovered a whole new world of bathroom hardware and software.

"Americans", a friend told me, "are not good at food. We should leave it to the Chinese, and stick to making toilet paper, where we clearly excel". It's true. The softest, cushiest toilet paper is generally to be found in that country of soft cushy things.

I discovered for myself not only that in many parts of the world is there no toilet paper, but that there is an alternative which some people who have a choice actually prefer. From the bottles of water in a private bathroom to the little shower on a hose, or the magnificent devices I first met in Japan and recently found on sale around the corner from my apartment in Oslo - a toilet with controls like an aircraft, where everything is built in, electrified, and adjustable to your own personal desires.

I found that the squatting pan never went out of style, and is still the preferred option in some places. Mostly in my experience an east asian option, somehow Italians also seem very attached to the design. I realised that the german and dutch bowls with an inspection tray where you can see what you've done before flushing away the evidence probably revealed something about people from that part of the world that I didn't need to know, and I discovered toilets that decide when they think you have finished and flush for you, and toilets that wipe the seat after you get off it.

I have met with many and varied designs for urinals, and seen the gamut between squatting against the wall at a busy highway bus interchange, and airlock doors with music to mask any noise being made inside.

In writing this I realise that the country bathrooms of my youth, with carpets and lace curtains, is probably a local custom, but the box of matches handily placed therein is more widespread, if equally old-fashioned. I have discovered my preferred tap arrangement (the single lever, but independent controls for bath and shower), learned the practical value of multiple shower heads, and now believe that there is nothing which someone, somewhere, doesn't consider a reasonable thing to do in the smallest room in the house.

I have come across various customs and usages from the rolls of paper one inch wide, for the use of gentlemen, to the habit of coming out of a pub in a modern city and urinating on the wall just down the laneway, or even in the doorway of the closed shop next door. I have pondered long and hard over graffiti, and I truly believe that the standards of those who feel compelled to add to the decoration have dropped markedly. I have wondered over designations for men and women, got them wrong, and seen them regarded as totally irrelevant by their target audience.

Most recently, I ran across the common Indian design of a small water jet built into the seat with a tap somewhere nearby. Obvious, if you know to look for it. I didn't, but I find that travelling broadens my appreciation of variety, and being curious in nature, it was a design that was, to me, both new and quite impressive.

I have not been in most of the world. And while there are only a handful of simple things that people actually do in the bathroom, I suspect that there is more left for me to learn than all the things I have seen so far.