Public Toilets, Peer Pressure, Poo, Piss and Penises

One of the many (two) suits I wear to work is a kind of light grey. It is almost impossible to negotiate a piss without at least one wayward drop being conspicuously blotted up by the material around my flies and forcing me to spend a minute in a limbo dancer’s pose beneath the hand drier to avoid any subsequent public disgust and personal humiliation.

This situation would be worse if I wasn’t more disposed towards using a trap rather than a urinal. However, there’s an unwritten law for men that demands that cubicles exist purely to cater for number two type ablutions and if all you need is a tinkle, then you use the urinal. If you don’t, the logical and totally just assumption is that you have a small penis.

What kind of retarded logic creates a hypothesis claiming that the reluctance to stand alongside other blokes with everyone’s cock out is proof of an admission of having a walnut whip shaped one-incher buried out of sight in your pubic forest? Oh, you’ve gone for a piss in the cubicle? You don’t want us to see your willy? Why’s that? Not that anyone looks, but the corner of your eye tells you straight away when someone’s unleashed a beast and yes it does cause you to change your angle of approach a little in the opposite direction so as to tacitly relay the message to your well-endowed urinal neighbour that the only reason why he can’t see yours out of the corner of HIS eye is because you’re stood at 30 degrees to his own line of fire.

Urinals ensure that you walk away with a generous sprinkling of splash-back on the front of your trousers. Visible or not, it’s there. So, I opt to piss in public as I would do so at home, stood astride a toilet bowl. And in case anyone hears the heavy trinkling noise that exposes the fact that I haven’t gone inside for a poo, I finish up by blowing my nose loudly as if to suggest that I would have used a urinal but for the fact that I needed some tissue paper.

Sometimes you don’t have the option of privately pissing and so you have to join the urinal throng. Some toilets are designed to afford adequate privacy by means of porcelain barriers between the wall-mounted bowls. This I would say is imperative for public lavs with three urinal spaces, just in case you end up alone with a middle-urinal freak, that spatially unaware pisser who’ll never opt for an end-urinal when all three are available.

I’m not sure which are worse out of those never-cleaned council public bogs you’d find in parks or high streets or those sparkling clean ones in expensive bars that look like the set from a toilet bleach advert and always come equipped with an assistant who offers to do everything for you bar shaking your cock post-pee, before hovering his bowl of lollipops under your nose hopeful of a quid. (Who ever thought that the first thing you’d want after a piss is a lolly or a boiled sweet?) At least in those toilets, when you do need to move into 2nd gear and drop your trousers in a cubicle, they don’t soak up a gallon of urine from the floor by the time you’ve passed the motion.

So I tend to avoid the high street gents’ lavatories, partly for that reason and partly because I have no desire to ring any mobile number “for cock.” I might be more tempted to step inside the sliding door of a modern electronic port-a-loo for single users, but I’ve always suspected that they are really TARDIS’s and who knows where or when I’d step out to afterwards.

But toilets can form part of our own nostalgic personal histories. In the school I first worked in, the male staff toilet had a bogey wall above the urinals. Someone started it and so everyone felt subconsciously inclined to add to it. A bit like the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, but for bogeys.

Also, I feel affectionately drawn towards the one in the primary school that I attended as a kid, because of the contests we’d have to see who could piss the highest up the wall. When I say “drawn towards” I do mean in memory rather than reality. My status as an ex-pupil has not allowed me access to that same toilet, which is a shame as I feel confident of beating my own record now; but you know how lacking in empathy head teachers and police are when you just wander into a school and make a beeline for the boys toilet.