Let’s talk dirty

There is only one marker of poverty today: Not when share prices fall so you can’t just nip into Harrods’ foodhall and indulge - it’s when you run out of toilet paper in the privacy of your own bathrooms and can’t afford to buy any more. That’s when you know for sure that you have hit rock bottom.

It’s not a concept easily understood in the Western World. Everybody seems to have forgotten what it was like before the softness to caress your behind was invented. The methods used even as late as sixty years ago when an outdoor latrine was not uncommon and bidets not yet installed make you wonder about how mankind coped with the whole unfortunate business of the digestive tract. Myself being immersed in history – and I am in awe how far we have come despite all the slaughter – I occasionally indulge in the less savoury sides of human existence. On the toiletting issue I’d recommend, amongst others, Ackroyd’s “London – The Biography”, Chapter 36 ‘Waste Matter’ . You’ll look at both your pristine toilet bowl and roll of luxury loo paper in a new way, I promise.

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