I write on a slow Sunday about our downstairs lavatorial. This is on its last legs and we are planning to turn it into a fully equipped shower room. A second bathroom, but without a bath. It is currently what is known in the north as a “bog” with a tiny handbasin. The ceiling is tiled with flammable polystyrene, there is a plug socket, and a very handy bookshelf. These are not either legal or sensible, or both, in a humid shower room and will be removed. And so, for posterity, I write.
Some years ago we acquired a genius book called Passing Time In The Loo. We installed it on the window ledge in the bog. Notice that it very particularly says “in” the loo and not “on” the loo. It has summaries, once known as précis, of famous works of literature to save you the bother of reading the whole work. Trouble is, great idea though it was, each summary takes me longer to read than the purpose for visiting the john in the first instance. And anyway, this was many years ago. There is now a whole range of these books, but we have not bought any more for the reason mentioned. Worse, the book has now somehow become foxed, which is an odd colour on any shelf, and simply fatal in the lavatory. The associations and suspicions are simply too powerful to ignore. The book might have to go down the chute. A better and more recent acquisition is the yellow and red tome shown here, which gives genuinely helpful and unique advice to help you master any toilet on earth.
My latest acquisition for the soon-to-be-removed bog-shelf is a handsome hardback called An Englishman’s Commonplace Book, published by the people at Slightly Foxed. It is a much better concept for temporary short-term sitting jobs in that you can just read each note, or quote, or extract within seconds. It has a handy ribbon marker so that I don’t need to resort to marking my place with Andrex.
The Commonplace book got me thinking. I think they should have branded it as the first volume in a range of toilet-friendly reading. I love the whole notion of a commonplace book, essentially a notebook that you keep to hand while reading. You then write down anything fun or memorable either seen in the book or that came to mind while reading, even if it is about something tangential. Far more efficient to keep these notes in a single notebook rather than in the margins of whatever you are reading. It also serves as a record of everything you read in a given year or decade. I think that for regular or compulsive readers, keeping such a book should be mandatory.
The more I think about it, the very definition of a compulsive reader is perhaps one whom cannot even toilet without having some printed matter to hand. As the holiday poo book suggests, the pages can always double up in an emergency.
