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My daughter woke early, but as I had come down to comfort her in the night without bringing my watch or phone I had no idea how early. The sun was up so my guess was it was about 6.30, but it was only once we were down in the kitchen getting her breakfast that I discovered it was 5.30. We couldn’t go back to bed now. It was going to be a long day. Luckily due to having a break from night time work I’d been in bed by 10, so even with the disturbed night I wasn’t stupidly tired. It’s just a long time to wait for the rest of the world to wake up. I wish I could say I used my extra waking hours efficiently, but I just watched a lot of Peppa Pig and CBeebies. I don’t know what Phoebe was doing. I left her to fend for herself upstairs.
I didn’t have such a good working day today (and it’s not like yesterday was incredible). I was hoping to secure more guests for RHLSTP at least, but in fact I lost one, as there had been a mix up with the date with Graham Linehan, so he isn’t doing the 20th June any more. Hopefully we will fix a date for later in the series, but I have 16 slots to fill and only one completely confirmed guest…. Could be a lot of me interviewing myself going on.
I am sure it will be fine and there are several people who I am waiting to hear back from on what dates they can do, but it’s annoying to have a day when things go backwards rather than forwards. I did start quite well, but made the mistake of quickly drinking a large pot of jasmine tea, with probably too many jasmine pearls in it, forgetting that that was a lot of caffeine and feeling a bit odd as a result. For about 15 minutes it made me a writing machine though.
I tried to work in a cafe when Phoebe was in nursery, but wasn’t in the mood. And however much you want to work that’s a big part of the writing process. Just being arsed to do it. I went to the loo (the same loo that this happened in). The toilet seat was down, but I am not the kind of man to wee on the seat or the floor - well not deliberately - so I lifted it up. Firstly I was distracted by some weird desiccated bits of something or other underneath the seat. It didn’t look like anything a human would excrete, so either a clumsy alien had been using this toilet before me or maybe someone had made a self-rolled cigarette in here and spilled loads of the tobacco. But why would you do that over the toilet bowl. I didm’t investigate too closely, but it seemed even weirder that the rim of the bowl had this substance on it when I let go of the seat and it fell back down on to the loo. It was one of those toilets where you have to hold the lid up yourself if you’re seeing (or rolling a cigarette). No wonder this man who had chosen to roll a cigarette over an open toilet had dropped his tobacco, he’d had to roll it one handed.
If I had a public toilet in my house (and I NEVER will) I would make sure that the toilet seat stayed up. Because most men are not as considerate as me and won’t want to get toilet seat germs on their fingers by holding the seat up, so will instead leave the toilet seat down and try and fail to wee through the poo hole. This is partly why public toilets have wee on them (even ones that work properly, idiots will not even want to touch the seat to lift it so will have a go at the impossible trick of getting all their wee through the hole). Then it’s a self-perpetuating circle of brackish misery, because once there is wee on the seat, event the normally fastidious don’t want to pick up that seat and risk rivulets of strangers’ piss cascading over their fingers or shoes, so inexpertly piss all over the place themselves.
And of course having to gingerly keep a toilet seat up with one hand does mean that your aim won’t be all that it could be anyway. So having a toilet seat that doesn’t stay up is like you’re saying, “I want to spend a good part of my day cleaning strangers’ urine from the toilet seat, bowl and floor.” Though I suppose it’s rarely the person who cleans the toilet who installed it, so in fact the owner of that branch of Caffe Nero is saying, “I want to know that my staff have to continually clean the urine off the toilet and that customers will usually have to contend with other people’s wee when they just want a wee or sit on other customers’ wee if they want a poo. Ha ha ha ha ha."
It would seem to me to be rule one of owning a toilet that is used by lots of people would be to make sure the seat stayed up. It can’t be that difficult. And saves you a lot of time in the long run. It perhaps explains the ocean of wee that I encountered in there all those months ago.
But you know, there's a chance that that loo might have two Metro columns written about it as a result of its filthiness. So that's something to be proud of.
