Now some Holiloos and Don’ts here.
There are few bigger passion killers than seeing your loved one relieve themselves through frosted glass.
Not a personal revelation here but an increasing situation in hotel rooms around the world.
Where traditional wood is giving way to glass doors.
All of which greater transparency honed into view.
With news from my old Irish stomping ground of what is being billed as a more open attitude to going to the bathroom.
Double up
With double loos for women at the plush K Sixty Seven Bar and Grill in Swords, north of Dublin.
Now, of course, men have been sharing their toiletry space with each other for generations.
Standing at troughs at football matches before we were upgraded to cubicles.
The Ausfahrt exit
And in fact those quirky Germans have even made a virtue of that.
As I discovered in Essen at the 11 Freunde sports bar.
By setting up plastic balls and goals in their urinals so that you can practise your shooting.
No surprise really for a country that prides itself on its toilet humour and deliberately plays with foreigners.
With such words as Ausfahrt for exit (quite literal our Teuton freunde).
Powder your nose
Of course a woman’s bathroom provides a very different function.
As a place for the fairer sex to reapply their make-up.
And talk to each other about the hottie they’ve just met in the bar.
It’s a universal theme.
Of course you can glean a lot about a country from its loos… and their signs.
One of my favourites, in Dublin, points you in the direction of the men’s and women’s… or fir and mná.
Which reads men left, women always right.
Signs of the times
Now, of course, you ought to tread carefully, or not at all, around toilet doors.
If you see a funny sign as maybe other countries or cultures don’t take too kindly.
To you photographing the bathrooms with people coming and going freely.
In fact our own countries here might take a dim view too.
Although some establishments seem happy to employ staff to live in the loos and pedal lotions and potions.
A twist on peer pressure you’d have to think.
A bit of privacy
To temples, as in the case of the Tyroleans in Austria.
And they ascended one particular mount to see their new revolutionary new flush.
But here’s a clarion call for women… give them their bathroom space and preserve us too from frosted doors.
They’ll thank us for it and besides it maintains the mystery.
Because it’s all part of your Holiloos and Don’ts.
Us men would like to preserve the myth that the fairer sex never need to deposit.
