So it’s officially summer which means the cricket and tennis seasons are in full swing and I am spending even more time with my boys ferrying them around training or competing at tennis and cricket. Hardly a day goes by when I do not have some sort of sporting commitment although yesterday I had a day off to go to Wimbledon and watch Juan Martin Del Potro and Novak Djokovic on centre court. And very nice young men they were too. There are some benefits to being a tennis and cricket mum – not many I admit – but eyeing up young men’s bottoms is one of them.
Anyway, the subject of this blog post is actually sporting toilets. Firstly, let me say the toilets at Wimbledon are very good and plentiful which is exactly what us Ladies need to know when we’re on a day out. Unfortunately, on most of my other days out it is the exact opposite which is why I always carry tissues with me. Yes, if you are lucky enough to find a toilet in working order you can bet your life there is no toilet paper.
Ugh.
Now, I’ve been horrified by the state of some of the toilets I have been in. But this week I came across a particularly shocking and gruesome one…
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| Gross. What else can I say? Well a lot actually. But none of it’s clean. |
It may be no surprise I was in quite a remote cricket field when I came across the above toilet. Now, being the investigative reporter that I am I decided to involve the groundsman in conversation about the said toilet. This was a mistake as one lady nipped in ahead of me whilst I was busy discovering (to my disgust) that after four flushes the toilet backs up and floods the loo. Lovely.
My immediate thoughts as the conversation evolved were..
How many Ladies have already been to the loo?
If a man has been to deposit “solids only” how many flushes does he require? Are there any flushes remaining at all?
Is having a pee behind closed doors worth the potential risk of drowning in faeces?
Why wasn’t I born a man so I could just pee in an empty coke bottle?
As you can imagine, as the conversation continued I was imagining all sorts of ghastly endings to my sojourn to the Ladies including being sucked alive down the toilet and dying a long miserable death in a septic tank. You see, Readers, I also found out that the loo backs up because the septic tank hasn’t been emptied for thirty five years. Apparently (after some searching) the club members have now actually located the tank in the cricket grounds – but sadly not the drain entrance. The groundsman was coming around to the idea that some jerk (my words not his) had built the storage shed over it.
Anyway, I crossed my legs and decided that if the worse happened and I was absolutely desperate to pee then in this instance fast tracking behind a shrub was my best plan of action.
The things I do for my boys. They have no idea how much I suffer for their art. Humph.
