As Australia is gripped by bog roll shortage, tabloid says: Here, fill your dunny with us "Wouldn't wipe my arse with it" is an expression you'll commonly hear in the UK to describe a newspaper the speaker doesn't like. However, tomorrow Aussie tabloid the Northern Territory News will invite its readers to do exactly that. In case you haven't noticed, 2020 has been pretty apocalyptic and Q1 isn't even done yet. Not …
It sure is a great idea from a selling viewpoint, however usage of such paper is best suited to bears-in-the-forest activity and not, as outlined in the article, as actual toilet paper to be flushed.
Now, as a follow-up, I'd like to know what customers actually thought of the experience.
Mine's the one with the 4-ply bog roll in the pocket.
They would sell a hell of a lot more if the pages had a selection of politicians faces printed on them.
For those who lack experience, screwing news print up and rolling it vigorously between your hands then flatten it back out before use, softens it, makes it more absorbent and tolerable for those with delicate derrieres.
I used to live with a guy who refused to buy bog roll. So the rest of us hid our own stashes of bum wad (behind the sink was a good place), whilst he made do with a telephone directory*.
* Note for kids; this was a big book in which the government-owned telephone monopoly, published everyone's name and land-line number. It had nice thin pages.
Oddly enough, I actually had a phone directory posted through the door last month. Hadn't seen one for years, and I thought they'd died out entirely, but apparently BT still do them on a somewhat erratic schedule. I'm in it twice; once for a house I haven't lived in for 6 years, and once for the current house which has never had a phone plugged into the landline. So still around, but probably not terribly useful.
Telephone directories are rubbish now. When they were important, they were great. Because with all the numbers and adverts they were thick enough to make perfect monitor stands. The ones you get nowadays are barely a hundred pages thick...
It's like the glory days of Computer Shopper and PCW magazines in the early 90s. 120 pages of content, 500 pages of adverts - and a free AOL CD coaster on the front cover.
I was in an Argos shop the other day and saw their nice thick catalogue.
A shop is a place where old people can buy things to take home instead of being delivered or 3D printed.
A "catalogue" is like Amazon, but printed on paper. It is a "book" with "pages" showing things to buy, like web pages.
"Paper" is a display system made from poor innocent trees. It has a digital interface if you lick your finger and then use it to turn the pages.
"Licking" is a form of intimate greeting that we used before SARS bird flu swine flu coronavirus golgotha plague.
At the Stately Manor, we regularly get a couple of phone directories every year: one for the (small) city in which the Manor is actually situated, and one for the metro area surrounding the nearest somewhat-larger city.
I even consult them occasionally, though mostly out of nostalgia.
Come to that, it was only last week that I finally canceled the Manor's "land-line" service. It has proven useful over the years, particularly during extended power outages when the cell-tower batteries run down. Then we're the only people in the neighborhood who can call around to see who has dry ice in stock. But now we know the secret reliable dry-ice supplier, and the cost of wired phone service from AT&T is outrageous - around $85 a month - so I turned it off.
I'm keeping the wall-mount phone, though, as a sort of trophy display. "Oh yes, as recently as 2020 this thing actually worked! You could use it to leave messages in someone's voicemail, which they'd delete without listening to."
The logic goes like this:
I'm safe at home
I can catch disease from the people outside
If I've already got the disease, I can't go outside
What if no-one delivers more toilet paper to shops because they're all sick
I don't like wiping my butt with my hand
I'm going to buy 3 months of toilet roll
Do like the Romans I say, have a nice sponge and give it a good wash afterwards.
Given the vast number of people I've seen leaving toilets without bothering to wash their hands, I feel I can safety say that for some, hand washing is an alien concept. Until some bloke on the telly points out that not doing so might make you sick (sick in a way that everybody is freaking out about).
Of course, when this all blows over they'll go back to not bothering again, because a few moments washing hands (national anthem optional) is such a hardship.
I have started abusing them, calling them dirty bastards, they look very sheepish.
If security say anything.
"That dirty bastard didn't wash his hands after using the toilet, and now he is going to walk around the supermarket touching food people eat. People are going to eat his pee or poo."
If they tried to hit me I would not hesitate to break their kneecaps. (Stamp on them).
"hand washing is an alien concept. Until some bloke on the telly points out that not doing so might make you sick"
I had the same arguments with my wife about leaving cooked rice sitting around.
No amount of showing her the reports would convince her - until some talking head said so on TV - and then it must be true because it was on TV wasn't it, and they don't allow lies on TV do they?
"They hardly use it anyway as they have delux wash'n'wax bogs"
And for the less Japanese of us, searching on Amazon, et al for "Bidet Toilet Seat" will find a number of devices which are more reasonably priced.
HINT: If you think you need warm water, you probably live in the arctic. Cold-water only ones are perfectly tolerable (Yes, I have one and yes they work - but you'll still need a bit of TP to dry off with. The expensive whizzo ones come with a warm air blaster to cover that angle.)
This and "sharuf" sprayers are more sensible approaches than wiping a thin film of .... "stuff" all over your cheeks.
However, and who'd 'a thunk my knowledge of the Water Regulations would come in useful on here? You bog is often on the floor above your kitchen tap, and sometimes shares the same supply pipe. So a bit of precaution might be in order.
The legal requirement is that you must have Fluid Category 5 protection between your bum and your glass of drinking water. Which means that a spray arm inside your toilet is a contamination risk - as is a shower head that can be accidentally dropped down the pan. Cat 5 means 2 pipe widths gap above the top of any vessel - i.e. your kitchen sink taps being high above the top of the side of the sink and old-school bidets having the taps above the top of the bidet pan with a spray nozzle to direct the flow down at your arse.
Some of the sprays can be fed via the toilet cistern - which is already Cat 5 because of the fact it's supplying the toilet. Others come direct off the mains, which is both illegal and somewhat dangerous. Obviously a lot of regs are overkill, but in my opinion not this one - because all the risk is small - you really need a drop in water supply pressure to cause backflow (or back-siphonage from shower hoses) - the health risk if it does happen is very high.
The law requries a break tank with AB air-gap, which then needs a pump, or to be high enough to give you water pressure via gravity (say in the attic). But that's because it's the highest risk and these are fail-safe. The fail dangerous option that's affordable and easy to fit is a double check valve on the final supply to whatever you're using. At lot of families where I live are of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, and a lof of those have shower hoses fitted off the mains cold water - and there's no way a lot of them can afford to do it legally. But it would be good if their plumbers would at least fit a £5 double check valve as a bit of insurance.
Sorry, digression over.
"Some of the sprays can be fed via the toilet cistern"
In Malaysia, toilets have a hose with a trigger nozzle attached to the pipe supplying the cistern, ie, not from the cistern itself, which gives you a pretty good clean-up before applying paper. If I ever have the wherewithall to buy a place here in Blighty, that's the first mod.
If the hose is from the supply pipe then it's illegal here. Should the kids ever drop it down the bog and there's a temporary drop in supply pressure, it can siphon water from toilet to any other outlet in the house. Be that your shower, or kitchen tap.
A double check valve makes that safe, if not legal. And a riskier kind of safe, because you can't check if the check valve is working very easily - but as the problem is low probability but high risk - it's probably a sensible trade-off.
Or I can sell you a unit for £2,400 (ex VAT) to give you 2 minutes of warm water at 40°C that complies with the regs. Or you can do it yourself with a £100 break tank, a shower pump and your own controls.
They say that invisible particles of crap land on your toothbrush just when you flush the pan in the usual way, if the bathroom sink is next to the throne. I think Snopes confirmed this but I'm not sure how to look it up. It still sounds scare-monger-ish and I'm not sure how having dishwasher components operating from under the seat is worse.
I used a public loo in Perth Scotland where the flush was on touch control and I accidentally touched it several times during my meditation. I was moistened, but I did not feel fully cleansed.
Robert Carnegie,
The word you are looking for is aerosolisation. And the advice is to close the toilet lid before flushing and also to keep your toothbrush more than 6 feet from the toilet. Even better if it's in a cupboard.
The big legionella risk factors are all about aerosols - because that's the easiest way to catch the disease. So you try to stop it growing in all water systems - but you have to also mitigate the risks, because the bacteria is present in something like 70% of water sources. So you just assume it's there and design accordingly. Which means keeping temperatures below 20°C or above 65°C as much as possible. And then doing extra testing and mitigation for the danger areas, which are swimming pools, cooling towers, showers, jacuzzis and to a lesser extent toilets and spray mixer taps.
"You bog is often on the floor above your kitchen tap, and sometimes shares the same supply pipe. "
Which (along with washing machines in the kitchen) shows how utterly unfit for purpose and dangerous by (lack of) design most British houses are.
1: That kind of layout is flat out illegal in most parts of the world - forget the water mains and think what happens if there's _any_ kind of disruption to the sewer pipe. (For the same reason a bath or shower above a kitchen would be illegal too)
2: A lot of countries require _at least_ one room's separation between laundry and food preparation areas due to contamination risks - especially prevalent if you think of the words "babies" and "nappies"
The regulations you're talking about are a half-arsed response to a slack-arsed problem that shouldn't ever arise in the first place - very much a case of "Oh, look, we'll deal harshly with a symptom AND IGNORE THE FUCKING CAUSE OF THE PROBLEM"
Alan Brown,
Washing machines in the kitchen are fine. All standard washing machine valves have a built in check valve to stop the taste of the rubber hose getting back to your drinking water - and any CE marked washing machine must have a double check valve built in.
The risk or washing machine water is a Fluid Category 3 risk - which can be dealt with by double check valve. Food waste is the highest category Cat 5, hence your sink tap gap being required to be twice the pipe diameter between the bottom of the tap and the top of the sink. So washing machine water going into is is less dangerous than the purpose it's already designed for.
The point about bathrooms being a floor above is simply that gravity means if supply pressure is reduced, then the kitchen tap can be fed from water higher in the pipe, due to gravity. Position is therefor irrelevant.
Whether bathrooms can be above kitchens, I've no idea. Though I thought UK building regs also required 2 doors between kitchen and toilet. We don't have those rules on laundries - but then I'm not sure that output from the dishwasher is any safer than from the washing machine. Both are Fluid Category 3 - and that should be the same across the EU, given that our Water Regulations are based on a common EU framework.
The risks you are worrying about are lower. What I'm talking about is poo coming out of your kitchen tap. But you're talking about it possibly dripping from the ceiling - which hopefully you'd notice and suspend cooking until any leak was fixed. Or from common drains, but your sink is already considered contaminated by the Water Regs - so they're designed to protect the mains from backflow and the house from cross-contamination. The Water Regs are a statutory instrument based on the 91 Water Industry Act - whereas what you're talking about is building regulations. Weirdly Part P is electricity and Part L is plumbing. Never got that myself...
What is this bog roll obsession?
Two reasons IMO:
1) It doesn't go off, so if the apocalypse doesn't happen, you don't have to buy bog paper for a while as you go through the hoard, you don't lose anything (such as going-off food) by stockpiling it if it wasn't necessary;
2) people are squeamish about bodily functions, they often seem to lose common sense when it comes to piss and poo, so they stock up on bog-paper to avoid that squeamishness. I once had someone who pee'd their pants when the toilet at home was occupied (and they arrived home absolutely bursting to take a piss) rather than just going into the shower or bathtub or laundry sink and pissing there or on the grass in the back yard behind a bush or something. Hell, worst case, it's only piss, piss on the cement of the verandah and hose it down afterwards. All better options than pissing their pants.
Back in the 1940s and 50s my father would read the newspaper and then tear it into squares and hang it in the outdoor dunny on a loop of string. Just saying that to my wife and she said not only too rough but too bloody expensive. At least once a week we would burn a couple of squares to keep the red back spiders at bay. Those red backs had a nasty bite at the best of times and they certainly wouldn't do your dangly bits any good.
When I lived in the bush, we had a deep drop as a dunny and Mum would tear up old newspaper and hang it on a piece of string. It did leave your botty with a few black marks though! That was back in the days when you got your fish and chips wrapped in newspaper; they definitely tasted better.
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We may yet see the same scene in Blighty come next year
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