Going Potty

By Hazel Last edited 212 months ago
Going Potty
badtoilet.jpg

A school in Barkingside has taken out all the mirrors from the girls' toilets because they are spending more time attending their appearance than attending classes. King Solomon High School then had to remove all the mirrors from the boys' toilets as the ever resourceful female of the species then began to sneak into the male facilities in order to continue their make-up and hair routines. Anyone who has had to spend any amount of time in the boys' toilets of a local secondary school will understand how desperate the situation had become.

Headmaster Rabbi James Kennard enforced the removal of mirrors in a bid to encourage girls at his school to evaluate themselves without (quite literally) referring to their looks and attractiveness to boys. If he was anticipating a teenage riot demanding the rights to apply lipgloss, blusher and mascara with accuracy, he was plainly underestimating the vigour of adolescent apathy: a reported "student revolt" was a rather thin affair.

"It turned out to be a small number of students in the playground for about two minutes. I was a bit disappointed that it fizzled out so soon."

If the man wants to cause toilet-trouble, he's picked the wrong group to mess around. If you've ever been caught short while out and about in town but have been unable to locate a public toilet because they've all been closed, and then forced to add to the two million pints of urine a year that flood London's streets, you can apparently blame the disabled.

That's the conclusion drawn from the Public Toilet Provision - The Way Forward conference organised on Wednesday by the Keep Britain Tidy group and the British Toilet Association. A whole can of worms was opened during the conference and disability campaigners were very pissed off:

"delegates were told one in five public toilets had been closed in recent years because of the cost of bringing ageing facilities into line with the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act (DDA)."

The conference organisers were keen to point out that their aim was in no way to discriminate or scapegoat any particular group - everyone's aim is just to improve public toilets in London for everyone. We would like to see more public conveniences in key places like South Bank, Covent Garden, Hoxton... well, everywhere, with working flush, unbroken toilet seats, good supplies of toilet paper and, of course, mirrors. All toilets need mirrors, whatever the Rabbi says.

Photo courtesy of the brave lads at www.badtoilet.org

Last Updated 21 July 2006