Pooping at the Daily Mail

This morning I woke up very late. The wind and a drunk man were knocking on the boat last night and it took me a long time to fall asleep. So I had to rush to get to work in the morning, and I couldn’t go through my holy routine of fruit and green tea that leads to the toilet. So that’s a picture of a Daily Mail toilet instead, where my poo was flushed down along with the poos of many other (shitty and non) journalists like me. And here I could start and never stop, isn’t it. The parallels between the brown matter and the aforementioned paper are endless. But l can already hear my mother reproaching me: don’t spit in the plate where you eat from. Mother, be reassured: I didn’t. I barely get food from them, let alone plates. Mother: I only shitted in their bathroom. Which is always a pleasure. 

On another note – it was almost strange not having to poop in a plastic bag. Toilets are a great magical thing: they accept your thing, in silence, and quickly make it disappear. No trace, except a certain degree of smell, depending on what you ate and drunk. Unless of course you spray-shit all around you or you purposely leave it there to piss someone off. But otherwise, it vanishes and you don’t really have to deal with it. Which is the whole point of having a proper toilette.  

Speaking with a friend about this shit project of mine, he did not seem to be impressed. He said he takes shits but doesn’t want to talk about them. And I’m sure many people share his view. Which is a totally acceptable view. But I wonder what’s behind this shame we have for our poo. Perhaps the History of Shit will provide some of the answers. Sent to me by yet another friend, this book written in 1968 ‘suggests that the management of human waste is crucial to our identities as modern individuals’ and also: ‘far from rising above the muck, we are thoroughly mired in it, particularly when we appear our most clean and hygienic.’