Now, wash your hands!

“Now, wash your hands!”

I was about seven; we were staying in a guest house.

“Why do they have signs up for that?” 

My mother’s reply...

“Some people are lacking in manners and are ignorant of basic rules of hygiene”. (Well, she was an English teacher and a bit of a snob.)

Fifty years later I am looking a sign in the Ladies toilet at Paphos airport (See above). You can imagine the looks I had trying to take that photo in its dimly -lit confines.

 “If you tried that in the Gents you’d be arrested,” my husband told me.

On Aphrodite’s Isle, for the unsuspecting tourist, the Cypriot lavatorial system can be a bit of a shock. This is true for all of Greece as well.

Do not flush your paper- it must go in the bin - their drainage pipes can’t cope with it. And yet the first flushing toilet was discovered in Knossos, built by the Minoans whose plumbing and drainage were the most developed in the Western World. Come back Archimedes and sort this out for God’s sake! (And the Greek economy too – that is going down the pan)

All deeply, deeply disturbing. Made me feel quite anally retentive.

Talking of which, I remember some other buttock-clenching experiences in my past.

Izal toilet paper, awful stuff, like scratchy tracing paper with a whiff of disinfectant and heaven help you if you used the non- absorbent side.

French toilets, toilettes à la turque i.e the old-fashioned hole in the ground variety where you stand and squat. But you often can’t find a clean place to put your shoes if the previous occupant’s defecation posture has resulted in a mis–squat. In the sixties my family would tour the camp sites of Europe. No matter how long the drive, my mother always insisted on checking the facilities. She was very demanding. If they weren’t up to scratch, we’d move on... 

German toilets have their own peculiar charm – the Inspection Shelf, a porcelain platform to catch deposits that can then be peered at for abnormalities before being flushed away. During my student year in Germany, I learnt that the natives have a robust no-nonsense attitude to bodily functions and the body itself. Their magazine adverts for laxatives were so amazing I had a collection of cuttings to show my fellow students back home.

Another unwelcome scatological memory is that of the Elsan toilet in our garden in South Wales (Well, there were six of us and queuing was a problem). One day an unholy row was going on. Mother, if you excuse the pun, was going ape-shit. My grandfather had substituted dock leaves for toilet paper. Presumably that messed up the chemical break down of the waste. Another bathroom downstairs went in shortly after.

Time to raise the tone I think, and so to end on a literary note I offer the following:-

My favourite story on the subject of Greek toilets is in Gerald Durell’s My Family And Other Animals. His sister, Margo, mistakes the bin of used toilet paper for a clean supply and is totally traumatised as a result.

Now, if that had been my mother the ablutions required afterwards would have put Lady Macbeth’s OCD handwashing totally and utterly, in the shade.