The Lavatory Reader

Floating Voters Elect the Lava- Tory Party

The general election is tomorrow but an incredible 38% of us are still deciding for whom to vote. The economy is shattered and we’re fighting two unpopular wars but many people are more preoccupied with the expenses scandal, Bigotgate and the general inter-party bickering.

 

Bigotgate: The Opera

A few choice pieces of political scatology may help to focus the mind by reminding us that bad behaviour is nothing new. And remember - only the Lava-Tory Party can turn floating voters into voting floaters.

For example, if anyone thinks that the modern crop of politicians dishonour their office by hurling abuse at each other, they should consider this piece by the Whig politician Charles James Fox (1749-1806). Although Fox published An Essay upon Wind anonymously, it was very publicly dedicated to the Tory Lord Chancellor, Edward Thurlow (1731-1806).  

 

I have heard, from several of your brother peers, that your lordship farts, without reserve, when seated upon the woolsack, in a full assembly of nobles. This is honest and impartial in Your Lordship, and you merit the thanks of the nation at large… Now this is manly – I admire great Nature in all her operations, and detest the wretched affected being who would check or counteract her in any of her sublime and beautiful works. Fame, my Lord, with her shrill loud trumpet, reports that Your Lordship’s farts are as STRONG, and as SOUND, as your arguments – as VIGOROUS as your intellects – as FORCIBLE as your language – as BRILLIANT as your wit – and as SONOROUS and MUSICAL as Your Lordship’s voice… May Your Lordship continue to fart like an ancient Grecian for many years.

(Charles James Fox – An Essay upon Wind 1787)

Lord Thurlow Squeezes One Out

Politicians were still making cheap scatological jibes in the 20^th century. F.E.Smith, Lord Birkenhead (1872-1930), a one-time Tory Lord Chancellor and a confidant of Winston Churchill, used to pop into the National Liberal Club in Whitehall Court to use the urinals on his way to the Houses of Parliament. Having done this for years, he was eventually accosted by a porter who pointed out that he was in a private club of which he was not a member. "Good God!" replied Birkenhead. "You mean it's a club as well?".

 

The National Liberal Club

Churchill himself, it is said, was once standing at the urinals in the House of Commons when the Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee (1883-1967) walked in. Churchill turned his back on him. “Feeling stand-offish today, Winston?” asked Attlee. “No,” Churchill replied, “scared. Every time you see something big, you want to nationalise it.”

 

How Churchill and Attlee Normally Greeted Each Other

However, sexual fraternity could sometimes overcome political antipathy. The Labour MP Tom Driberg (1905-1976) was renowned for his promiscuousness. Churchill allegedly said that “Tom Driberg is the sort of person who gives sodomy a bad name.” In his autobiography, Driberg described his entry to the House of Commons in 1947 and how he was assisted by the bisexual Tory MP, Henry ‘Chips’ Channon (1897-1958). The suggestion that cottaging went on in Parliament between knowing members of rival parties should give today’s puritans pause.

 

Only a few hours after I had been introduced to the House, when I was still wondering about in a daze, and lost, Chips kindly showed me round the most important rooms – the Members’ lavatories. This was an act of pure, disinterested, sisterly friendship, for we had no physical attraction for each other.

(Tom Driberg – Ruling Passions 1977)

 

For his part, the Conservative Enoch Powell (1912-1998) urged restraint. The documentary maker Michael Cockerell (b.1940) once asked him if it was true that he always liked to make a speech on a full bladder. “Absolutely,” Powell replied. “You do nothing to decrease the tension. If anything you seek to increase the tension before you speak… I speak with more passion on a full bladder.”

 

Enoch Speaking on a Full Bladder

However, the greatest piece of political scatology dates back to the seventeenth century. It is often said that the House of Commons today resembles a bear pit – but it is a shadow of its former self.

In 1607, Henry Ludlow farted in Parliament during a debate about the naturalization of the Scots. This may have been an accident – his father Sir Edward Ludlow was renowned for having farted in a committee meeting – but the House fell about and Ludlow’s farting Nay-vote passed into folklore. Endless poems were written about the fart – the best-known being The Censure of the Parliament Fart from the 1620s which begins thus:

 

Never was bestowed such art

Upon the tuning of a Fart.

Down came grave ancient Sir John Crooke

And read his message in his book.

“Very well,” quoth Sir William Morris, “So.”

But Henry Ludlow’s Tail cry’d “No.”

Up starts one fuller of devotion

Then Eloquence; and said a very ill motion.

“Not so neither,” quoth Sir Henry Jenkin,

“The Motion was good; but for the stinking.”

“Well,” quoth Sir Henry Poole, “it was a bold trick

To Fart in the nose of the body politic.”

“Indeed I must confess,” quoth Sir Edward Grevill,

“The matter of itself was somewhat uncivil.”

“Thank God, quoth Sir Edward Hungerford

“That this Fart proved not a Turd…”

 

It is too long to reproduce in full but those who are interested – or have still to decide which way to vote – can view it here. 

Happy voting...

Education and Sanitation

The Conservatives have just unveiled their new education policy promising better teachers and a shiny future for our schools. However, in the past, it has not just been the education that has been in need of reform. The facilities themselves were in urgent need of an overhaul. I trust the Tories will take note...

For example, in 1518, Dr John Colet (1467-1519), the founder of St Paul's School in London proudly attested to the fact that he had provided the boys with somewhere to urinate. More serious business could be dealt with in the River Thames. The mind boggles to consider what must have gone on before:

 

To theyr urine they shall go thereby to a place appointed, and a poore childe of the schole shall see it conveyed awaye from tyme to tyme, and have the avayle of the urine. For other causes if neede be they shall go to the watersyde.

(Samuel Knight – The Life of Dr John Colet 1724)

 

Matters had hardly improved by 1843 when Queen Victoria was being shown around Trinity College, Cambridge by the master, Dr William Whewell (1794-1866). Lavatory paper was not invented until 1857 – by the New Yorker Joseph C. Gayetty, whose “Therapeutic Paper” was marketed as being “a perfectly pure article for the toilet and for the prevention of piles.” At the time of Victoria's visit to Trinity, students would tend to use pages torn from books and the primitive plumbing in the colleges meant that the paper (and everything else) ended up in the River Cam.

 

There is a tale of Queen Victoria being shown over Trinity by the Master, Dr. Whewell, and saying, as she looked down over the bridge: “What are all those pieces of paper floating down the river?” To which, with great presence of mind, he replied, “Those, ma’am, are notices that bathing is forbidden.”

(Gwen Raverat - Period Piece 1952)

 

However, the collision of education and excretion has not always been a disaster. Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773) took great pains over the education of his illegitimate son, sending him endless letters of advice. Samuel Johnson, on the other hand, considered that Chesterfield's letters taught “the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master”, a neat description that was recently used to describe modern bankers. Chesterfield, however, was adamant that time spent on the privy could be spent instructively. This piece also serves to explain just how those soiled book pages would end up in the River Cam.

 

I knew a gentleman, who was so good a manager of his time, that he would not even lose that small portion of it, which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house; but gradually went through all the Latin poets, in those moments.

He bought, for example, a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, carried them with him to that necessary place, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina: this was so much time fairly gained; and I recommend you to follow his example. It is better than only doing what you cannot help doing at those moments; and it will make any book, which you shall read in that manner, very present in your mind.

Books of science, and of a grave sort, must be read with continuity; but there are very many, and even very useful ones, which may be read with advantage by snatches, and unconnectedly; such are all the good Latin poets, except Virgil in his Aeneid: and such are most of the modern poets, in which you will find many pieces worth reading, that will not take up above seven or eight minutes.

Bayle’s, Moreri’s, and other dictionaries, are proper books to take and shut up for the little intervals of (otherwise) idle time, that everybody has in the course of the day, between either their studies or their pleasures. Good night.

(Lord Chesterfield – Letters to His Son December 11^th 1747)

 

All of which should serve as useful information for the Conservatives as they refine their education policy...

Darling's Budget: Failing to Take the Piss

Alistair Darling’s Pre-Budget Report perfectly captured the air of desperation swirling around the government. With the general election looming, it was no surprise that Darling decided to throw a populist bone to the masses, in the shape of a 50% tax on bankers.

Politically astute though this may prove to be, one can’t help thinking that Darling was simply responding to massive pressure from campaigning sites such as 38 Degrees – rather than coming up with the policy through his own initiative.

How different the state of our economy might be if the Treasury was prepared to think outside of the box. For all New Labour’s talk of blue sky thinking, not one of Gordon Brown’s apparatchiks has the vision of someone like the Emperor Vespasian (9-79 CE) who, when the public finances of Rome were tight, decided to impose a tax on all the urine collected in the city. 

 

Alistair Darling or the Emperor Vespasian: who would you choose?

 

Nero had experimented with a similar tax a decade earlier but Vespasian was the first to see urine as a keystone of his economic policy and, as such, placed huge pots throughout the city for the people to use. Tax was payable by the head of each household every four years. The urine collected was then sold to be used in tanning, to stiffen cloth and as a source of ammonia to whiten togas. Titus, Vespasian’s son, complained about the tax but, unlike Alistair Darling, the Emperor had a ready answer for him.

 

When Titus found fault with him for contriving a tax upon public conveniences, he [Vespasian] held a piece of money from the first payment to his son’s nose, asking whether its odour was offensive to him. When Titus said “No,” he replied, “Yet it comes from urine.”

(Suetonius – De Vita Caesarum 121 CE)

 

The Latin proverb Pecunia non olet (‘Money does not smell’) may date from this time – and is something that Darling should think about as he lashes out at the bankers.

Vespasian, unlike Alistair Darling, was to be long remembered for his taxes – even today, the street pissoirs of France are known as Vespasiennes and in Italy as Vespasiani.

 

Psychedelic Urine Drinking and Sycophantic Toad Eating

My friend Lucy Cooke, aka the Amphibian Avenger, is in the Amazonian jungle to investigate the deadly Chytrid fungus that threatens the very survival of the world’s frogs and toads.

 

Hearing of her mercy mission, I felt compelled to discover whether amphibians and fungi had ever before crossed scatological streams, as it were. I was delighted to find this description of tea drinking amongst the Turkic Tartars of the 18^th century. Just as in Great Britain at the time, tea was highly prized and its consumption was initially limited to the richer members of Tartar society. The difference between the Tartars and the British, however, is that the Tartars made their tea from psychedelic mushrooms and the poorer Tartars would catch and drink the urine of their social superiors. This uriposia was because the psychoactive elements in the mushroom tea would still have a considerable effect when consumed a second time.

 

The Russians who trade with [the Tartars of Koraki] carry thither a kind of mushroom… These mushrooms the rich Tartars lay up in large quantities for the winter; and when a nobleman makes a mushroom feast all the neighbours around are invited. The mushrooms are prepared by boiling, by which the water acquires an intoxicating quality, and is a sort of drink which the Tartars prize beyond all other. When the nobility and the ladies are assembled, and the ceremonies usual between people of distinction over, the mushroom broth goes freely round, and they laugh, talk double-entendres, grow fuddled, and become excellent company. The poorer sort, who love mushroom broth to distraction as well as the rich, but cannot afford it at first hand, post themselves on these occasions round the huts of the rich, and watch the opportunity of the ladies and gentlemen as they come down to pass their liquor, and holding a wooden bowl, catch the delicious fluid, very little altered by filtration, being still strongly tinctured with the intoxicating quality. Of this they drink with the utmost satisfaction, and thus they get as drunk and jovial as their betters.

(Oliver Goldsmith – The Citizen of the World: Letter XXXII 1762)

 

The amphibious reference comes further down in this same passage.  Its connection to fungi is somewhat spurious but fascinating nonetheless. Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774) refers to sycophants as toad-eaters (from which we get the word ‘toady’). This usage first appears in 1629 and derives from the fact that all toads were thought (erroneously) to be poisonous. Quack doctors would hire an assistant to eat a toad in front of an audience and then ‘cure’ him of the poison; so unpleasant was the job of this assistant, that to be a toad-eater became synonymous with the type of person who would do anything for a superior. Of course, some toads are indeed psychoactive...

 

 ‘Happy nobility!’ cried my companion, ‘who can fear no diminution of respect unless seized with strangury, and who when drunk are most useful! Though we have not this custom among us, I foresee that if it were introduced, we might have many a toad-eater in England ready to drink from the wooden bowl on these occasions, and to praise the flavour of his lordship’s liquor. As we have different classes of gentry, who knows but we may see a lord holding the bowl to the minister, a knight holding it to his lordship, and a simple squire drinking it double-distilled from the loins of a knighthood?’

(Oliver Goldsmith – The Citizen of the World: Letter XXXII 1762)

Dramatic Claudio from Amphibian Avenger on Vimeo.

Eating Faeces and Drinking Urine - It's All in the Bible!

Eating faeces and drinking urine are considered distasteful by most people yet they both have a long history. Coprophagia is usually practiced by sexual deviants or as a form of bodily mortification. Imbibing urine, on the other hand, is regarded by some as a legitimate medical practice... although not always.

In 701 BCE, for example, Sennacherib, King of Assyria, was poised to capture Jerusalem. Rab-shakeh, Sennacherib’s emissary, threatened the Israelites on his master’s behalf.

 

But Rab-shakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? Hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?

(2 Kings 18:27)

 

Proverbs, on the other hand, appears to be giving advice rather than trying to intimidate.

 

Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well.

Let them be only thine own, and not strangers' with thee.

(Proverbs 5:15-17)

 

Pondering this, John Armstrong, a consumptive living in Britain in the 1920s, wondered whether this really was a reference to the body's own water. Ignoring the prevailing medical opinion of the day, Armstrong began drinking his urine, cured himself of consumption and eventually wrote a best-seller on the subject, The Water of Life (1944). However, this practice has been going on in India for centuries.

 

The prophet Ezekiel, on the other hand, was ordered by God to cook some rather strange bread.

 

And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight.

(Ezekiel 4:12)

 

It’s debatable as to whether this means that the faeces should be mixed in with the barley cakes or whether it should be used as fuel but, in either case, Ezekiel balks at this part of the recipe. Quite reasonably, he points out that his soul is not polluted and he has no intention of putting something so abominable in his mouth. God duly allows Ezekiel to use cow’s dung instead.

Spa Water is Filthy Shit

Spa water, if it contains pollutants, can have a violent effect on the digestion. This excerpt from Rabelais suggests one should only ever bathe in spa water and never drink it.

 A short time after this the good Pantagruel fell ill, and was so afflicted in his stomach that he could neither eat nor drink. Also, since misfortunes never come singly, he was taken with a hot-piss, which pained him more than you might imagine. But his doctors came to his aid and most successfully. For with plenty of lenitive and diuretic drugs they made him piss his complaint away. But his piss was so hot that it has not grown cold since that day, and you will find some of it in different places, in France, according to where it flowed. These are called hot baths, as at Cauterets, at Limons, at Dax, at Balaruc, at Néris, at Bourbon-Lancy and elsewhere; and in Italy at Monte Grotto, at Abano, at San Pietro Montagnone, at Sant’ Elena Battaglia, at Casanova, at San Bartolommeo, at La Porretta, in the province of Bologna, and in a thousand other places.

(François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantaguel: Second Book 1534)

Pantagruel’s urine was still causing havoc at the end of the century when the Swiss physician Thomas Platter the Younger visited Balaruc near Montpellier.

 

After drinking [the spa water of Balaruc], you go for a walk in the countryside. Ladies of elegance walk leaning on the arms of their servants or of their gallants; and as the water acts promptly, and causes abundant stools, it is a curious spectacle to see everyone firing off in full view, and even vying with each other; for there is no bush or tree to give cover.

(Thomas Platter the Younger – Diary 1595)

The spa water was no less powerful in Britain. In this satire, John Mennis (1599-1671) notes how the countryside around Epsom Wells was covered in excrement and strewn with paper torn from books with which people had wiped themselves. The medicinal qualities of Epsom’s water were only discovered in around 1640 and the spa was in terminal decline by the 1730s – perhaps because of the build-up of filth. The traveller to Epsom, according to Mennis, actually competed to see who could defecate the furthest.

 

‘Tis here the people farre and neer

Bring their diseases, and go clear.

Some drink of it, and in an houre,

Their stomach, guts, and kidneys scowre…

Close by the Well, you may discerne

Small shrubs of eglantine and fern,

Which shew the businesse of the place;

For here old Ops her upper face

Is yellow, not with heat of summer,

But safroniz’d with mortall scumber.

But then the pity to behold

Those antient authors, which of old

Wrote down for us, philosophy,

Physick, musick, and poetry,

Now to no other purpose tend,

But to defend the fingers end…

Here no Olympick games they use,

No wrestling here, limbs to abuse,

But he that gaines the glory here

Must scumber furthest, shite most clear.

(John Mennis – Upon a Journey to Epsam-Well 1656)

 

A painting of the Epsom Well Building in 1795

 

An Unlikely Fable: How Aesop Learned to Piss as he Walked

The following extraordinary story can be found in one of the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Life of Aesop, composed around the second century AD.

 

So Aesop followed along after Xanthos. It was high noon, the hottest part of the day, and since the road was now deserted because of the heat, Xanthos lifted up his robe and began to urinate as he walked along. When Aesop saw this, he became furious, seized the hem of Xanthos’ robe, and pulled it. “Sell me,” Aesop demanded, “since you won’t allow me to run away!”

“Your own puddle accuses you, Xanthos! For if you, a person who is master of his own fate and does not live in fear of blows and punishments, cannot take just a minute to see to his physical needs but urinates while walking, what am I, a slave, supposed to do when I’m sent out on some errand - defecate on the wing?”

“I urinated while walking along to avoid three unpleasant consequences.”

“What are they?”

“The heat of the earth, the smell of urine, and the burning rays of the sun.”

“How is that?”

“Do you see that the sun is directly overhead and has scorched the earth? If I stop to urinate, the hot ground burns my feet, the smell of the urine rises up to my nose and irritates my nostrils, and the sun burns my head. Thus, by urinating while walking, I avoided these three unpleasant consequences.”

(Anonymous – The Life of Aesop c.150 AD)

 

Public Urination in the Bible - Pisseth Against the Wall

Much of Kings is concerned with disgruntled monarchs who fall in and out of favour with God. One of the most interesting episodes concerns Jeroboam (c.930-900 BC), a “mighty man of valour” who later had a large champagne bottle named after him. Jeroboam’s troubles begin when he worries that if the people went and worshipped in Jerusalem, they might switch their allegiance to Rehoboam (both a mightier king and a bigger champagne bottle). With little thought for what’s gone before in the Bible, Jeroboam makes two golden calves for people to worship instead, with predictable results.

 

Therefore, behold, I will bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam, and will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth against the wall, and him that is shut up and left in Israel, and will take away the remnant of the house of Jeroboam, as a man taketh away dung, till it all be gone.

(1 Kings 14:10)

 

It should be noted here that dung has to be physically taken away – there is no organised sanitation system yet in place. However, God is now obsessed with the awful crime of mural micturition although, given the lack of facilities, a wall must have seemed as good a place as any. However, it has been argued that “him that pisseth against the wall” is a proverb meaning “every male person” so perhaps we shouldn’t take this line too literally - and certainly not as Pastor Steven L Anderson does.

Similar fates befall Elah and Ahab in chapter 16 and 21. Mark Twain comments on all of this theistic weirdness in his Letters from the Earth of 1909, a contentious and iconoclastic work that remained unpublished until 1962.

 

A person could piss against a tree, he could piss on his mother, he could piss on his own breeches, and get off, but he must not piss against the wall – that would be going quite too far. The origin of the divine prejudice against this humble crime is not stated; but we know that the prejudice was very strong – so strong that nothing but a wholesale massacre of the people inhabiting the region where the wall was defiled could satisfy the Deity.

Take the case of Jeroboam. “I will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth against the wall.” It was done. And not only was the man that did it cut off, but everybody else.

The same with the house of Baasha: everybody was exterminated, kinsfolks, friends, and all, leaving “not one that pisseth against a wall.”

In the case of Jeroboam you have a striking instance of the Deity’s custom of not limiting his punishments to the guilty; the innocent are included. Even the “remnant” of that unhappy house was removed, even “as a man taketh away dung, till it be all gone.” That includes the women, the young maids, and the little girls. All innocent, for they couldn’t piss against a wall. Nobody of that sex can. None but members of the other sex can achieve that feat.

(Mark Twain - Letters From The Earth 1909)

Pissing at Table in Regency England

The French traveller Louis Simond observed the English behaving abominably in the early nineteenth century – although in contrast to the Icelanders of the sixteenth century they had the good grace to go to the chamber pot rather than have it brought to where they sat.

 

There are some customs here not quite consistent with the scrupulous delicacy of which the English pique themselves… Will it be credited, that, in a corner of the very dining-room is a certain convenient piece of furniture to be used by anybody who wants it. The operation is performed very deliberately and undisguisedly, as a matter of course, and occasions no interruption of the conversation.

(Louis Simond – A Journal of a Tour in Great Britain 1810)

Pissing at Dinner in 16th Century Iceland

The revolting custom of urinating at table did not decline with the Roman Empire. Indeed, in Iceland in the 16^th century it had become compulsory. One can only pity the women of the household…

 

Neither is it lawful for anyone to rise from the table to make water; but for this purpose the daughter of the house, or another maid or woman, attendeth always at the table, watchful if any one beckon to them; to him that beckoneth she gives the chamber-pot under the table with her own hands; the rest in the meanwhile grunt like swine least any noise be heard. The water being poured out, he washeth the basin, and offereth his services to him that is willing; and he is accounteth uncivill who abhorreth this fashion.

(Dittmar Bleecken – Voyage to Iceland and Greenland 1565)