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The spare toilet roll in my hotel room was located on a holder pointing upwards from near the floor, just to the left of the toilet bowl. I don't know who thought it was a good idea to put it there, but maybe they had never encountered any human males. Or at least never seen them urinate.
I didn't examine the roll too closely but I could see that it looked a little stained and "water" damaged. Of course it did. People were using this toilet at night time, when drunk and it wasn't their toilet roll. Why would they care? Some of them would have hit it on purpose, but nearly every man who'd been in that room would have got something on it, even if they didn't realise. The penis (especially the middle-aged one) is the least reliable urine delivery system you could come up with. With the possible exception of whatever it is that women have down there instead. But at least they are (usually) sitting down and the damage they can inflict is thus limited.
Of course there was a whole roll on the actual toilet roll holder and it would take some kind of multi-shitting monster to use that all up in a night, so I was safe from the horrors of the spare roll.
But what if the roll on the proper toilet roll holder used to be the spare toilet roll?
If you start thinking of the awful things you will encounter in hotel rooms then you'd never sleep at night.
A bogey on a shower curtain is at least visible (if I had to pick one thing that epitomised my many years of touring it would be that bogey). You need one of those special ultra violet lights to see the Jackson Pollocked rainbow of bodily fluids that is decorating the walls, floor, chairs, desk and bedding.
I love Bristol very dearly and always have a fabulous time here, plus it's full of memories of childhood shopping trips (I bought my first Sony Walkman here with a week's wages from Axbridge Mushroom farm), ice-skating, celebrating the slave trade by naming everything after the people who were best at it and getting drunk after gigs. But the city looked tired and a bit broken on this visit. The shopping centre, which used to be the height of glamour for me (and source of Sony Walkmans) looked much the same as it did in the 1980s, except now a lot of the shops were boarded up and as you drove out of the city there was a lot of graffiti and gloom. Of course there are many lovely parts in the city and perhaps I haven't really observed it properly in recent visits, but like much of the country, it looked in severe decline. Almost like not spending money on basic stuff will turn everything to shit. If a city as beautiful and vibrant as Bristol can start crumbling round the edges then what hope is there for anywhere?
