I'm in my "flat" and I've just finished "cacking" and I'm staring down my "bog". Three weeks ago, those words meant nothing to me; but now I live in London, and my bathroom has a strange little black hole for a toilet, and I haven't seen my poop since I got here.
Toilets in London, or at least the ones I've encountered, are designed to keep this society from
The King's new throne.
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seeing its poop. While the Germans are notorious for pooping on shelves (the poop sits there, steaming and stinking for you to admire, until you press the button and hope the rush of water clears off all the smears), British toilets keep you enjoying the fruits of your labor. The bottom of the toilet curves down and under the bowl; your butt is positioned just above the curve, and the velocity of falling poop slides the dook down and under the ledge. If it's a long log, you might see the turtlehead peeking, but that's even worse -- the barest hint of something worth seeing, mocking you because you can't see your production in all its glory.
I've been in London three weeks. I miss Taco Bell and I miss bowling and I miss the Sunday New York Times and I really miss seeing my poop.
The flush toilet was born in London. In the 18th and 19th Centuries, the Victorians were obsessed with repressing the natural urges of the body -- the smells and sounds and desires and productions of the body were thought to be something of the lower classes, and so the Victorians sought to eliminate them. They would do their business in closets that muffled the sounds and kept in the smells; the servants would surreptitiously remove the awful offal once the immaculate master had passed from view.
But with that system, servants still knew their masters pooped, and the Victorian masters knew they were living a lie. Naturally, there was economic demand to get the servants out of the equation. An inventor named Alexander Cummings improved upon a failed 16th Century water closet design (poop went down pipes!), and a parade of inventors perfected the device over the years until, by the middle of the 19th Century, the modern flush toilet was born.
The Victorians loved the water closet because they could distance themselves even further from the stinking riffraff. In working class London, poop was dumped in cesspits if the pooper was a responsible citizen; more likely, a filled-up chamber pot was just emptied out the window. Poop saturated the working class neighborhoods; to us, then, with the benefit of modern science, it comes as no surprise that an 1849 outbreak of cholera killed 55,000 Londoners.
We know now that feces carries bacteria, and that when poop gets into drinking water, bad things happen. London found that out in 1854 when a researcher named John Snow discovered the correlation between crap and cholera. A few years later, Dr. Edwin Chadwick issued a groundbreaking report blaming dysentery, cholera and typhus on fecal contamination, and identifying sewer systems as the way to solve the problem.
We know that the rich, with their spotless mansions and pipe-conveyed poop, probably didn't die of cholera like the poor, whose streets flowed brown every time it rained. But the rich did suffer -- after all, they lost 55,000 mindless drones they relied on to toil in their great factories. And so once it was determined that proper sewage systems could keep the poor healthy, it comes as no surprise that the government and the wealthy were suddenly incredibly concerned with the sanitary plight of the poor.
Generosity? Philanthropy? Not really. My flat has a toilet because the capitalists didn't want me to die of poop.
Six score and nine years later, I stand in my once-working class flat, staring sadly at the tip of my latest poop, enclosed in water because Victorians didn't want to me to smell my poop and hidden from view because Victorians didn't want me to see it. I miss America, where a pooper can admire the textures and intricacies of his or her production before consigning it to a sanitary demise and going off to work cholera-free.
Sighing, I instinctively reach with my left hand to flush, and my knuckles brush cold, bare porcelain. In London, or at least at my flat, they flush on the right side of the toilet; that's something else I'm having a lot of trouble getting used to.
-- Dave
