This week's subject is not too tasty.
Age 11, on an exchange visit to France, I discovered the bidet. Its absence in all other Western countries has puzzled me ever since. And poses a question...
Why do the French, the Arabs, the Japanese, the Indians and most other Asians, wash their bottoms after they've been to the toilet, while Americans, Australians, Britons, and most Europeans prefer to take a piece of paper, wipe off what they can, then smear the rest around until they have a thin film of faeces covering the anal area where it stays until next time they have a shower or a bath?
Toilets in Arab and most Asian countries have a hose pipe next to the seat with which to wash your bottom when you've finished. The French use a bidet on which you sit while a rising jet of water does the washing for you. The Japanese prefer a system in which the rising jet of water is incorporated into the toilet. But in Britain, America, Australia, and Europe (outside of France), after they've finished performing on the toilet, people wipe their bottoms with paper, but don't wash them.
To be succinct, and none too polite, the world is divided into two distinct camps - the bottom-washers and the shit-smearers.
If you're a bottom-washer and you find yourself staying in a hotel in Britain or America, and you need to do a poo during the day (because you're jet-lagged, perhaps, and your timezone is out of kilter), you have a problem. The only way to properly clean yourself when you've finished is to hang your bottom over the edge of the bath and use the shower hose.
In many hotels, there isn't a shower hose, just a shower head sticking out of the wall at a height of six feet. So the only answer is to get completely undressed and start your ablutions again from the beginning. And that's only if you're lucky enough to be at your hotel. If you're not, and you have to use a toilet in a public place, paper is the only option.
This may sound like a poor-taste lavatory joke, but it's not. It's serious. And completely inexplicable. I'm not talking about the poor or under-privileged or homeless; I'm talking about the middle-classes, the well-healed, the educated, the rich, the super-rich, even the medical profession. In nearly all the Western world, hundreds of millions of these people walk around a great deal of the time with grubby bottoms. In the Middle East, the Far East, and France, they don't.
Frequently I've seen a chat show - Jay Leno's was the last time, and I remember it once on Parkinson - where a celebrity returning from Japan describes the pleasure of discovering, after using the toilet, that the push of a button turns on a jet of perfectly aimed warm water to wash his behind. Another button produces a jet of warm air that blows it pleasantly dry. The audience laughs, the celebrity is applauded, the viewers treat it as a weird story about a funny foreign place, and the next day everyone who watches the show goes back to smearing shit around their bottoms as usual.
All that's needed to avoid this is a 'shower-douche' - a stainless steel flexi-tube. One end has a small press-tap, the other end is fixed to a faucet next to the toilet. You can buy them in hardware shops in London's Edgware Road, centre of the annual Arab summer migration, or in Southall, or Birmingham, or anywhere there's an Indian or Bangladeshi community. Or go online and type in the words 'shower-douche'.
There should be one of these next to every single toilet seat in the world. Yet when Manchester Airport installed facilities for people who wanted to use a traditional Moslem squat toilet, and included a shower-douche, the outrage was instant. Granted, no one much likes those silly footsteps toilets where you squat over a hole in the ground. But that wasn't what upset Mr. Mike Bone of the British Toilet Association. For him it was the idea of washing your bottom. He said the bottom-washing shower-douche posed 'a hygiene hazard'.
Unbelievable! Yet it's what most Brits and Americans seem to think.
Now, though, there's light at the end of the tunnel, and it's our national airline that's flashing it. British Airways has installed bidets in the toilets of its first class lounge in Terminal 5 at Heathrow. It's a start, but hardly enough to justify Willy Walsh receiving any sort of award for contributions to anal hygiene.
That should go to Shinichiro Ito, the chairman of the Japanese airline, ANA. Its new aircraft are being fitted with bidet-type bottom-washing toilets in all three classes.