Street

Under the roof that mother nature gave us, a black, star speckled open expanse. Soft breeze in my hair, and chips... My drunkard friend hurls chips at me, oh how hilarious, and the line waves across the side of this footbridge near the train tracks. I couldn’t decide if this really counts, but since I found an area, a private (within reason) space, off the beaten track, close to the stonework...
For sure I’m not the first to have gone here either, not in this kind of ‘student area’, on the line from town to my humble home.

Pub

The toilet has a dirty redish colour, somewhere between the light and the paintwork (neither taking full responsibility). Dirty, as in, evoking the depraved (more than it can live up to). Claustrophicaly thin, it’s kind of set out like a corridor between two cubicles, with one wall designated for collecting urine, the aluminium curtain, a small incompetent drain at the centre.

Gallery

Hospital? Maybe it’s the baby changing facilities, and the electric water heater... I don’t know I’m just getting hospital here. There are two steps up to the door into this room. The window is barred with no subtlety. and a set of four pipes run up the wall next to the toilet bowl. There used to be a large door, (out of use) lent against the wall in here, until recently. There’s room to breathe. I’m about to do a short reading from this blog to a small audience. It makes me nervous, even though it’s small and informal. I get that nervous shit forming feeling. Performances are often preceded by a significant eviction of the bowels. I’m not sure why, something that the body does in response to the nerves and stress? This time I retain control, and decide against it.

Pub

Out of order faded across the cubicle door, won’t put me off, it looks ok. Typical order for this kind of pub the cistern is very high up with a chain, the cubicle has tiles up to waist high. The rest of the room, is pretty small, kept kind of clean. There’s no overriding style here, a mix of allsorts. Wood, plastic ceramic, any colour, things have been written on... it’s been this way for a long time. Kind of just flitting and evolving.

Work

The toilet is like this: you step in through a door, that’s fairly normal from a room that has lockers and coat hangers. Right in front of you is a large mirror with three sinks; on the wall to the right are two soap dispensers. There is an empty disposable hand towel dispenser on the wall and under this is an open brown cardboard box with disposable hand towels, they scatter around, some flat, some screwed, toward a bin. Next to the bin is a mop and bucket. To your left (the whole room is maybe ten by fifteen foot) are two toilet cubicles, the locks are almost broken, but operate well enough to jam the door shut. everything is… is a kind of greyish hue, one way or another (green, blue, orange, cream...)
Enter.
I go to one of the cublicles: God knows what has occurred here! I use the urinal instead.

Home

There it all is again, the tiles, the window sill, bits and bobs lying around, a tap dripping into the bath, a mirror surfaced bathroom cabinet with a door ajar... in the morning light there is less romance, ha! Romance? Not what you’re thinking. I mean everything is so pedestrian. Everything looks kind of ugly in the blue grey spray through the window at dawn.

My home is very much my own home. There is something through these unslept eyes that likes it here. Likes the kind of lifestyle, staring into the sink, remembering every drink, in turn. Scrubbing them off my teeth.

Pub

Terracota tiles square out the floor, it’s compact and quiet. Urinals regulate a corner and two cubicles, not in line, one deeper set than the other. Black gloss on a panel gives me a refracted relfection, a kind of scratched silhouette, as I stand facing a toilet bowl in the cubicle.

Home

Home again, in this little temple. The house is more active than it has been for an age. I wait patiently my turn in the diary room. Things to evict. That feeling your being watched, happens to me more often in the toilet than anywhere else. There is something filmic. Often at night, especially if I’ve been watching films, even more so if I’ve watched horror films, I can’t look into the mirrors. It’s too close to a scene. It’s uncanny.

Home

I thought I’d be writing more about the very fabric of these rooms, shapes, structure, layout... you know, the initial activation. The first moment, before colours and objects and acts. But it’s not speaking to me. I’m listening to it, but it’s almost monotone. Walls are walls, baths are baths, toilets are toilets. Things really are as they seem.

I go into the toilet to use it, although I’m looking more than before, I’m still under the usual functional distractions. The body is busy, and mind pulled along... not dislocated... getting involved.
It wonders such strange pointlessness’, ‘Can I touch the ceiling?’ and enacts the test, with inevitably positive results. And there I’ll stand holding it up, biding my time before getting on with more pressing concerns. I vocalise a few lyrics that are looping my thoughts, let these pesky beasts loose, let them their raucousness outside of my brain, they’ve drained.
Piss.
I check my pulse.

Home

The sink, stores a chill, a crisp cold in its ceramic. To touch it, it’s soaked in cold. Dry cold. The rooms bigger than before. I don’t want to touch anything. Everything has sucked the warmth from the room. Even the floor consumes the heat from your feet. The draught reigns here. The outside atmosphere allowed to influence everything in this room. Blackness looks in through the window, pressed close to the glass. White clinic. I’m a brave.

Pub

Small blue mosaic tiles rule this wall of this large airy room. A spa feeling. Urinals are intersected by frosted glass. framed drinks promotions hang at eye level. For a pub toilet it’s big and clean. A wall of sinks with a huge mirror. This is almost extravagant. Somewhat against the grain of, pub culture... grot, small leaky spaces, open window all year, graffiti wrapped condom machine. I’ll not complain, I hate having to wait till I’m too tanked to think of the fat biker waiting behind me, eyes burn into the back of my head causing a serious stage fright – not here. The most elegant space in the building here saved for the soils. Saved for a safe feeling where we are most vulnerable, most exposed.

Friend's House

This room's small, has simple aesthetic that’s well considered. Bare dark wood and obsidian floor, teal walls and a Japanese print tastefully above the bath. It feels kind of bohemian, a sort of European in love with the eastern. The idea makes me smile and I imagine stepping out into some smoky Turkish bar, crossing over to some bare wood table, to play chess on a board sloppily stained onto the wood in Indian ink, scratched and faded with use, drink espresso from a tiny brown cup with a stags head (bust) coming from the side... ok and back in the real world, I’ve been looking around, reading the room. This blog has given me quite strange toilet habits.

Work

A huge mirror meets you as enter, the doppelganger looks unimpressed at your poorly kept uniform, so you share a careless customer service smile, stretching into a grimace for a fraction of a second, proving a cold irony.

The cubicle doors swing a little and so slowly, like a ghost town, paleness of the clinical decor. Details mostly in blue and orange scatter, Orange cubicle door (stopped swinging), blue bog brush, orange hand washing reminder, blue toilet roll dispenser...

My brain is deadened by this building. I’m a series of functions. I fit in, in here.

Friend's House

A bath, boiler, and toilet. It’s almost a bit rough, the side of the bath is uncovered. I’m naked at the centre of the room washing from the sink. The room feels so... so many things I cant find words for. It’s quite peaceful... yes, peaceful. I’m waiting, trying to discover something. Trying to discover the point of all this writing. All I keep seeing is the dusty rough exposed underside of the bath.

Friend's House

This one is long and thin. A yellow hue. Damp floor. Lino.
My eyes struggle to stay open. I’m just glad of a spot of relief. I’m leaving in just a few hours, To go back home. I peel back days of... A thousand worms uncanned this week... I’ll be trying to untie from some of them, with my megabus home. Some though are rooted in, and require a little care.
The room is everything required of it. There is no time to exploit the space here, what I need now is forty winks.

Friend's House

It has crisp shape, clinical accuracy, but not losing its homeliness. Stepping around the shower, a large window has frosted glass that looks scratchier than smooth. I’m in a tangled daze, this morning, and drift through (slowly unpicking), I rub at the red wine tarred on my lips. A light steam hangs off someone’s shower a few minutes before this. A high density collage of shampoo and conditioners on a little wooden set of shelves. Something about it here is not myne. But it’s safe to be here.

Pub

Such a small space the tiles grid up everywhere. Off white (in the direction of cream) and a glistening Blue. There is something farmhouse about the feel of it. Something rustic and cold. The metal urine trough lines one short wall, a man stood unsociably close to the centre... I risk the cubicle which is clean.

Arts/events Venue

Somewhere between playschool and prison… or more… Activity center. The doors are brightly coloured to cubicles. The venue is hosted by huge railway arches, man-made caverns.
The toilets occupy one arch, high ceilings rocking overhead. Thick dusted brickwork and strip lights strung at jaunty angles. The venue sometimes operates as a nightclub venue, this had been the case recently as the debris of drunken poor aim and discarded drinks a sticky wedge of lime pressed in the base of a glass. Trying to find a respectable space here is not as simple as it would have seemed. I’m on my own again, whilst here in the toilet. But it’s such a communal space, even appears to be mixed gender. I stand at the washbasins chunked in right at the center of the room. I can feel people milling around, chatting, their leftovers in glasses on the floor, or balanced on the back of the sink. There’s a clear social feeling, echoing into the daytime …the clean up … the set up …today.

Home

Sometimes I remove all of my clothes before taking a shit. I can’t explain it, I just feel compelled.
This is one of those days. The fan (it’s been broken for ages) howls like an abattoir; my heavy hand thumps it into a rough buzz. And... I disrobe. I can already feel the weight pressing gently.
My body shaped lump of flesh, stands in the air.
With a kind of minds eye (not in the mirror), I observe myself ...like a kind of third person detachment.

A shit occurs.

Get dressed.

That’s it.

Pub

Chlamydia ?
Clamydia?
The poster asks? I’m not sure if I’m part of the target demographic, at least... that’s not what I’m in the toilet for. The warning tells a thousand stories of those for whom it is intended. Those people who pass to pick up a condom, or drag a female drunkard into this tight cubicle. One who casts his eye over her shoulder and sees that vigilantly bi-lingual sign... doubt? It’s all yours.

Tiled floor, small shaped, thankfully quiet, wooden door, lock busted, held shut by my foot, balance ,piss, failing to decipher graffiti, wooden door.

Home

So these two bogs, Home and Work, punctuate the average day. Back at my house, empty , myself excepted. The bathroom, sits right at the back of the house, a window would open out onto the garden, but it’s too cold for that. The Fan has fizzing to grating motor sound. Simplicity is something held in high esteem in this area of the house. Functionality is the most important element to the room. There is something so logical, so systematic; it’s somewhat pleasant to walk into the order; away from household build up of clutter, junk, trinkets, books, work, tat and stacks of... The door closes you into a routine, so ingrained you almost don’t know your doing it. The space awaits you and guides you, offers no distractions or quirky brilliance. And in one moment of that order, there is a pause, it’s a pause for as long a you want.

Work

Institutional toilets are a hit and miss affair. Well, I can’t help but enjoy the warm clean clinical situation of the art school, or the art centre (before they moved theirs outdoors for major redevelopment – and I have high expectations of the new toilet facilities.) The art school was the first time I broke the unspoken rule of every young boy ‘ No Shitting at School’ .I can never quite figure out why this rule existed, and I remember coming across significant evidence of some kids breaking this law. Maybe it’s something that I fabricated. Something I applied (unspoken) to everyone hoping that I’m not being weird. The rule however somehow has carried, not into the art school but into the work place. I never shit at work. This has never been a significant problem. The room is reminiscent of the school toilet. Very grey, flaking paint. Disconcerting signs that regulate the space with logo and slogans ‘Make Handwashing a Habit’. Two cubicles and two urinals, if possible I only use the toilets if the room is empty of my colleagues. The room has a bit of clutter, a bucket and several boxes of industry standard paper handtowels. The cubicles itch with graffiti, currently homophobia is the major theme, taking the baton from racism some months ago. A few poorly made A4 posters (which is a generous description for a printed word document) advertise some kind of charity raffle, which I don’t know much about, the font is too small and I’m not about to hang about here reading. The smell is unpleasant in a chemical rather than natural way; I’m not sure which is worse. I make handwashing a habit, and leave.

Home

White squares, green oblongs and a red circle. Ok so I’m looking around the room, much more conscious of ‘looking for things’ than ever before. I’ve sat here staring into space, day after day after day. There’s nothing I haven’t absent mindedly cast my eye over. The white square tiles cover one wall, and part of its adjacent wall. Two green bathroom mats and one circular red bathroom mat. The red circle almost really strikes me... but fluff and bits of hair and stuff gives it the grotty uniform. This bathroom is mostly clean (obviously lived in- old toothbrushes, empty shampoo canisters, and damp towels slouching off the radiator- signs of life) but there is a kind of faint grotty outline, just along the base of the walls and around the base of the toilet.

I think a little about the lock. It’s just a tiny brass bar, but it’s critical to the toilet’s definition. The lock needs to be there. I hardly ever lock it anymore. I used to, and in every other toilet I do without fail. But this is in my home. Mostly home alone. So the peace is unlikely to be disturbed.

Space for Safe Solitude.

This page will contain text based documentation of every toilet that I enter over the next forty days. Toilets are unusual in that they are architecturally designed for aloneness. In this place the very bricks and mortar have been placed for safe solitude. The space for private happenings in the flesh and safe exploration of our thoughts.
I think the texts will be focused on the space and locus of the toilets rather than the events that take place durin my visits. I'll see how things progress.