Noo loo
Behold, our new upstairs toilet. The old one always had a crack in the cistern and finally started to leak last weekend.
It’s a heartbreak to spend that kind of money for a pot to piss in, so let me at least get a goddamned post out of it.
British toilets were my first hint that being a foreigner might be harder than expected. I have difficulty flushing the ones with levers. They look like the familiar American toilet handle, but turning them does nothing. You have to put a little…hell, I don’t know. A little oomph on them.
Maybe it’s because English toilets have the handle on the right and I had a lifetime experience flushing handles to the left.
I don’t know. I looked in the tank once — instead of the good old Yankee doodle float-and-flapper, there’s all this spooky alien tech back there. Weird shit. Not messing with it.
The worst was the toilet in London. I was completely that toilet’s bitch. Every time I turned the handle, it gave a little growly noise, swirled stuff around in a bored, perfunctory way and…nothing. I never got it on the first try, and after the third or fourth try, I’d have to wait for the tank to fill up again.
A bathroom break could take me twenty minutes. Uncle B must’ve thought I had some kind of unspeakable problem down there. It was a while before I explained.
Because, let me tell you, the thing when you’re in a new relationship and trying to look all desirable and attractive and stuff: you really, REALLY don’t want to ask the new boyfriend in to check out your bidness and help you flush it.
Luckily for me, the new one’s foolproof — it’s pushbutton! And like a lot of toilets here, it’s a two-stager. The big button is a little flush, the little button is a big flush.
Get me! Flushing like a big girl!
Oh! And then there was the time we went to Arundel and the toilet at the train station was a proper old-fashioned water closet, with the elevated cistern and the pull chain and everything. I was so excited. It was the highlight of my trip.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
February 11, 2011 — 10:19 pm
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