Or perhaps it should be called, a cry from the heart. We at Frost love this view from the other queue, the one the women love to hate – the blokes’ public loo. A hilarious review.
Karma is indeed unforgiving, and so as a gentleman of a certain age I now realises that I should not have found my late father’s google map like knowledge of the location of public conveniences quite so amusing. Of course my father lived in an age when these were indeed conveniently located. Not so today.
It was also euphemistically called spending a penny. Oh for those bygone days when use of the urinal was free and the cubicle cost a mere penny. I accept that inflation has required the price to rise, but why so much discrepancy? At the Baker Street Underground it is free and though the soap dispenser isn’t filled with the most expensive of unguents – when you have an hour on the Metropolitan line in front of you, such free access comes, literally, as a relief.
A mere five minutes away and the charge at Marylebone Station rises 30p, similarly Paddington Station Kings Cross, St Pancras and Euston Stations. Travel to Charing Cross though and the cost rises to 50p.
If you haven’t the correct change a helpful machine will dispense what you need usually in the smallest denomination known to man, ensuring that your pockets bulge and you list alarmingly to Port .
Machine fed coins release the turn-style unless of course you haven’t noted the direction of the arrows and try to barge your way through using the fleshy part just above the knee and thigh, oblivious to the toilet attendant who is practicing his semaphore from behind a thick glass window, telling you graphically that you are going ‘in’ through the ‘out’.
It might be thought that at this point all obstacles have been overcome and would that this were so. But no, for now one is faced with a row of urinals and the etiquette has to be observed. Unfortunately no one teaches you the code (unless somehow I missed that lesson) but worse no one speaks of it either. It is the urination equivalent of Fight Club.
If the urinals are all vacant the first man there must stand on the furthest left so that the second may stand at the far right. In this game of urinal chess the next takes the middle and the rest fill in the spaces in between. The main rule is not to stand next to anyone unless there is absolutely no alternative. All eye contact is to be avoided, elbows should not touch and any speaking must cease unless you are returning from a match and the conversation is about football.
The space saving layout of some lavatories can lead to a nasty surprise especially when the hot air hand dryer blows down your ear whilst you are otherwise engaged. Looking round sharply at the cause can lead to rule breaking eye contact, not to mention, wet shoes.
Recently the architects of such edifices can be found trying to satisfy customers old and young which can cause confusion for the less observant. Some urinal stalls are set lower to accommodate boys who have yet to reach their full height. Those of us that have not only reached such height but also exceeded it, can find ourselves directing everything other than our attention to a lowered stall which alters what I suppose I should call the fall out zone, leaving one to come up with a plausible explanation for dampened trousers. Kings Cross Station has resolved this by lowering all the urinals. I say no more.
If one has managed to navigate the various perils of ‘spending a Penny’ including working out where the automatic sensors are for the soap and water one might imagine that one (if lucky) is home and, particularly, dry but there is one more and possibly the most difficult challenge still to be met.
On leaving, one is almost bound to be met by the malevolent glares from those in the queue for the ladies, at which point it is advisable to remember the golden rule.
No eye contact.