This is all a bit delicate.
My paternal granny said that there were three things you really shouldn’t talk about (politics, church and women), and one that you absolutely mustn’t (the loo). It made being caught short when staying with her something of an ordeal, but we put it all down to life’s rich tapestry and did our own thing. Sometimes literally.
I spent a bit of last week in a fairly basic research hut on a Welsh island getting involved in shearwater fledging and, for lots of public-spirited reasons, I made it my business to be as infrequent a visitor as possible to the facilities there. Fellow ex soldiers will know exactly what I am on about.
It turned out that this avoidance was a mistake, as it was a lovely loo in every respect, most particularly in that it had a little framed picture of a rival loo somewhere in a Tanzanian village just above the cistern. The rival loo had a beautiful thatched roof and proportions that would probably have delighted Pevsner. Underneath the picture, was a little note to the effect that our Skomer Island crapper was twinned with the one in Tanzania, as part of a scheme to bring safe and hygienic toilets to a few areas of the world that really need them.
The idea is beyond brilliant. For £60 a lav, you can twin with one elsewhere in any one of eleven countries, £60 being the approximate amount it costs the charity to build one somewhere that really needs it. And you can do it with your workplace, your office, your uni house, your town. Even that granny you have who won’t talk about that kind of stuff, you can do it for her.
And in doing it, you are doing your tiny bit to roll back the appalling health consequences of bad sanitation, any of which, and much, much more, you can read about in the link below.
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So the downstairs loo at home has now got a friend in a toilet block in a Rohinga refugee camp in Myanmar, and Caroline is doing one for an upstairs loo, but is refusing to tell me where the twin is until the certificate turns up. It may be that you do this already but, if you don’t, perhaps you might consider getting stuck in.
My granny probably also said that you should never talk about the charitable deeds that you do, and I am sure that she is right. However, I see the statistics, and there are enough people that read this blog to know that, if a handful come on board, we could make a bit of a difference. For that reason, please do indicate if you might get involved, just so that I know.
And you know what I am proudest of? Of course you don’t. It is that I have got through a short blog on a tricky subject without making any awful toilet puns.
Even in that last line, which is basically tailor made for that kind of thing.
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