Toilet Etiquette 2: The Toilet Strikes Back.

Interestingly, or perhaps worryingly, the most popular individual page on my blog (discounting the hundreds of views of the picture Richard Dawkins transmogrifying into Emma Watson that I stole) is the one about male toilet etiquette.

Therefore I have decided, in order to propel my writing to new levels of popularity, to pen the difficult second story.

Sequels are worse (apart from the Godfather Part II and The Dark Knight), we have had this drilled into us with horror films. And this will be no exception.
I used up the good material early. Now you're just getting the dregs.

There are two toilets in my house.

There's the little draughty downstairs one that used to house this pink metal monstrosity that, during the winter, was the coldest fucking thing in the world.
I'm not exaggerating.
Fortunately it was renovated a few years back and is now good.

Then there is the upstairs one in the bathroom. Old faithful.

Both doors have a lock.
And neither of those locks work.

I hope that sends chills down your spine. If you have ever been in my house, and felt safe and secure knowing that the toilet has a lock: you were wrong.

Whilst this is inconvenient, it has established one thing very clearly in our household:
If the toilet door is completely closed, that means it is occupied.

Unfortunately, at other people's houses this rule is not always in place.
I mean, as a rule, generally people close the door completely if they are using the toilet. But sometimes they also completely close the door once they come out, making it impossible to know if someone is in the toilet or not.

Many times I have approached a closed toilet door in an unfamiliar house and had to silently wait outside for the tell-tale splashing noise to tell me whether it's not safe.

I hate knocking on the door and someone calls:
"Just a minute"
Hate it.

So up next is Toilet Etiquette 3: The Prequel, in which David completes potty training. It's a cracker.

The Gay Side, and how it definitely existed.

Trying to explain "the gay side" to people who didn't go to Manor Hall Middle School is something of a challenge.

Walk into the boys toilets and there are a series of cubicles first, followed by two long, steel urinals, one on the right hand side, and one on the left.
Everyone went to the right hand side.
This is because the left hand side was "the gay side".

Even if there was a queue, everybody patiently waited.
Those poor kids who were not aware of "the gay side" on their first visit, would be mocked insessantly.
"Look," said the chorus from the right side "he's on the gay side!"
Those kids learned quick. We all did.

No-one questioned "the gay side". No-one, no matter how badly they needed the toilet, questioned the ludicrousness of this unwritten rule.

Perhaps the rule was true. I mean, I never used the gay side, and have remained straight. Although I don't think the gay side ever implied that it was exclusively for homosexuals, or indeed made someone a homosexual.

It was just "the gay side", and it was avoided.

Trains, and where you must not sit.

So, now that I have work to go to every morning I have to ride the train. I get the same train everyday, it leaves Southwick at 9:37 and arrives at Hove at 9:44. Some of the people who get on at Southwick I see virtually every morning. It hasn't got to that stage yet where I could say "morning" and they'd recognise me though. They fairly often have papers or magazines to read. I invariably leave my issue of Kerrang at home and only have them to look at.

I get on my train, which is always the same level of fairly-busy. Now, here is an observation about English people. It's something that has been made many times before, but the point is that it's not just a cliché: it genuinely happens. We really do not like invading personal space.

As we noted weeks back with the male toilets, the train also appears to have this unwritten social rule about where you are allowed to sit down.

Arranged into rows of two seats on each side, there is also a couple of "table" seats in each carriage.
The table seats are the most highly prised commodity, even if you don't need a table remotely, you go and sit there if it's free.

If a table isn't free, then a free set of two is your best bet. If they are taken (and by taken I mean one person is sitting in the window seat: that constitutes both seats being taken) then you must sit on a table but at the furthest possible point away from the person who has already occupied the table. If they're facing forwards sitting on the window seat, you must sit facing backwards in the aisle seat.

After that it's better to stand than to encroach people's personal space.
No-one will complain or even give you a funny look if you sit down in the adjacent seat.
But inside you are dead to them. Dead.

The guessing game.

I hate embarassing situations. But here is one I am subjected to on an occasional basis.

My friend says to me:
"Guess how much I paid for this bonsai tree!"

In front of me sits this little thing. It's cute, and looks like a pretty example of a miniature tree.

Now, I know how this annecdote is supposed to work:
I guess a arbitrary figure, and then the teller of the annecdote amazes me, by revealing the price is x10 in either direction.
"OH WOW! It was that much/little?"
Fin.

But there is a problem.
I have absolutely zero knowledge of how much a bonsai tree is worth.

You could tell me £15, and you could tell me £1,500, and neither would particularly amaze me.

But if this annecdote is going to work, we are going to have to avoid that part where I make a guess and it is virtually right. That makes for a terrible annecdote.

What I tend to do is make a ridiculous guess.
"£1 million" I say, in the hope that this will save the annecdote.

Inevitably, though, they role their eyes and say:
"Come on, have a serious guess"

Well, that might have been a serious guess! I don't know! And now this stupid story about the price of a tiny tree has become worse than uninteresting; it has become something that is causing great stress.

I am now at the point where I am forced to make a serious guess.
But the problem is that, because they have asked me, I know that the actual figure is going to be incongruous to what it should be.

So now I have to try to guess whether they are trying to impress by how high the price is, or how low.
Cos if I guess £50 now, but the revealed discount the price is £75 (but should have been about £350) the the story is ruined.

If I guess £500, and it actually cost them £350, the story is similarly ruined.

I can't win.

Male toilets, and embarrassing social etiquette.

I went to the cinema to see Inception. Great film; incredible action sequences and an epic story.
But during my trip to the cinema I was involved in an equally epic case of the embarrassing reality of being a human male.

The cinema was busy, and we had arrived late anyway. We queued up to buy our tickets and gawped at the extortionate prices Cine World places on that most expensive of commodities; popcorn.
Time was short, I knew, but it was going to be a long film, and powerful though my bladder is, it was unlikely to last two and a half hours.

I rushed to the toilets, and found myself in a difficult situation. Let me explain.

Cine World's toilets are fairly big, with 8 "adult sized" personal urinals along the wall with 2 "children sized" ones at the end.

Now, unwritten male social etiquette is actually extremely clear in this field. The first man must ALWAYS take the urinal closest to the far wall. The following must be filled with a one-urinal gap in between, allowing for a maximum of 4 "adult sized" urinals to be in use at any one time.

Under no circumstances do you take a urinal in between those in use. It's just not right.
That would indicate you had made a conscious decision to step in between two pissing men.
Not only that, but it would mean you had to CHOOSE two men to step between. That means you've chosen two men over 3 other possible combinations of two men.
That would make you gay.

I'm sure you can imagine what comes next.

I walk into the toilets, and the wholly inconvenient number of four men are using the toilets.

Time was running out. I needed the toilet badly, but I could not risk contravening the etiquette.

Now, do not be to hard on me, I made the following decision in the heat of the moment. I buckled under the pressure.

The "children sized" urinals were free.
I had to take it. It was the easy option.

With a sombre look on my face, I stepped up to the white porcelain rising little higher than my knees. Seconds after I had taken out the top button, and unzipped the fly, the inevitable happened.

All four men who had been using the toilets stopped, virtually simultaneously and shuffled away, leaving me alone, standing at a child's urinal with a full complement of adult urinals available.

What were my options? I considered sidling across to the adult urinal to my left, but it was too late; the fly was down, the tackle was out (as Blackadder puts it).
I couldn't move now, like some urinal hopping lunatic.
It would be fine. I could relieve myself, and leave with my head held high, as long as I was quick.

It got worse.

Now, everyone had left the toilet by now, and so I was standing there, pissing into a child size urinal, alone.

Who could walk in now, but two young boys and, I presume, their father. I can only imagine the look on his face as he saw a fully grown man, standing in an empty toilet, with multiple full-sized urinal options available, using a child's urinal.

Looking back, this whole situation could have been avoided if I had been sensible and just used one of the free cubicles. Silly me.