Now Wash Your Hands

I have a favourite toilet. It is in a fancy bar, twenty floors up the Shard building. The urinals are great marble monoliths giving the user the finest views across London. Never have I urinated with such majesty and perspective, it is a place to think whilst emptying the bladder. If it wasn’t for the exorbitant cover charge at the bar, there’d be queues of philosophers snaking around the elegant wash basins, chatting about logical positivism and hand sanitiser. 

The worst toilet I ever faced was in a girlfriends cousin’s house. The old Italian mother had died and the son, in his fifties and struggling to cope, was a stranger to toilet duck. You took your life in your own hands if caught short, the bog a breeding ground for cholera and mutant pubes. If you’ve seen video footage of Chernobyl, you’re about halfway there. Like the old myth about hair, perhaps he thought that after a while it would clean itself.

I recently read an article about a remote village in Scotland that didn’t have modern plumbing until very late last century and the residents had to go in a bush or seek out a wooden privvy, by which I mean a thunderbox at the end of the garden overflowing with effluent and fag ends. Like the man employed to wipe Henry VIII’s arse with a rag on a stick, it was some boy’s job to dig this out every week and dispose of it, God knows where, probably in a river. Perhaps he went on to found Thames Water or something.

In a desperate stab at progress, in 1970 the council built a public toilet out of concrete with flushing toilets and individual cubicles. No more squatting over a cesspit with a vicious highland wind blowing up your kilt. They gave each household a key and dozens of people would line up for a little luxury. There is a great picture of the villagers all queueing up to spend a penny, nattering away, leaping from foot to foot and as they gossip and tell stories. In many working class communities people would unite over a pint, over the garden fence or in their shared love of competitive vegetable growing. In Auchmithie, they also caught up as they went about their daily business.

Perhaps what strikes us first is how primitive it all sounds. A communal toilet- life without indoor plumbing. We file it away with ration books and polio; another reminder of how fortunate we are to live in the twenty-first century. Okay, so this is deceptive nostalgia. Now they have sewers, I doubt anyone in Auchmithie is hanging a blue plaque or campaigning to preserve the old building for future generations. I can moan about the collapse of society but no one is currently sitting around wishing they were queuing in the rain and making small talk whilst dealing with a nasty dose of the threepenny its.

What is interesting to me is that people had to share so much in those days. We tend to think that community is built on grand things like shared values, loyalty and wife swapping. More often it is built from sharing countless tiny inconveniences.

We’ve become remarkably efficient at removing those inconveniences. We scan our own shopping, work from spare bedrooms and wear headphones on the bus. These are all wonderful advances but every improvement quietly removes another reason to cross paths with another human being. Perhaps that helps explain why we seem more connected than ever and yet so many people describe themselves as lonely.

I suspect relationships work in much the same way. They aren’t only strengthened by dramatic declarations but by the little interruptions and compromises that life imposes on us. What a joy it is to make someone you love a cup of tea or hear them repeat a story they’ve already told you. It’s an honour be woken in the night with a phone call when they are far away or to watch their favourite terrible tv show.

There is great beauty in lovingly allowing the life of another human being. We don’t just make our peace with reasonable discomfort; we can learn to appreciate it. The fact that we share each other’s trials, tribulations and annoyances is the essence of companionship. Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. Creating new things together.

James Graham has just written a book about what it means to be English, citing shared experience as part of feeling part of a community. He writes about gathering together to watch games in the World Cup. 

‘It’s what 20th century French sociologists call collective effervescence. It’s the fizz that we all feel when we are part of the same story, doing the same thing, watching the same thing at the same time’. 

There is joy in togetherness. I want to go to gigs and football matches- these people are my comrades. I want to be there when a partner needs someone to offload on, or when they are ready to share the things they are scared of. We are human beings and we need each other. No amount of social media updates can replace that.

Progress has made our lives immeasurably more comfortable. I’m just not sure we’ve always noticed what we’ve paid for that comfort.