The Throne of Contemplation

The rented flat in which I live is a fine place, well decorated and appointed in a modern style, and though I have been here only a little over 6 weeks, I am so far content with it, and it is certainly a major improvement on my previous hovel. A minor grouse, however, was the toilet seat, a flimsy white plastic arrangement which moved underneath me in a rather disconcerting way. Now, without going into the grimmer details of the business, it seems to me to be a basic human right of the sort delineated in the United Nations Charter of Human Rights that a person in such a situation should not be disconcerted, but on the way to, if not Nirvana, at least a kind of inner peace...

So I took the bull by the hornybits and went out and bought a mahogany veneered throne seat. The improvement is considerable and immediate! This is only a cheap, mahogany effect veneered thing, the bulk of which may well be mdf, or plastic, or anything really, but it is the bulk of the thing which counts. When I rest my ample form on it, it stays where it should stay. It doesn't flex and bend. It doesn't slide sideways and make you re-position yourself to balance it on the rim. It just quietly does what it does, and I like it!

Also, it looks mahogany. Not only does this remind me of my childhood toilet, an important part of anyone's early life, but mahogany seems to me to impart a certain gravitas to the proceedings. A mahogany toilet is a Man's toilet, for a Man's life in a Man's world. What re-assurance! No namby-pamby apologist pine to go with your girly pastels shades, no pseudo hippy dolphins or reiki pebbles, but good old fashioned, manly, dark, serious mahogany, redolent of a lost age of Victorian certainty. Now I am fully aware that the lost age of Victorian certainty was an age of racism, warmongering, child prostitution and consumptive illnesses, and lost is a bloody good place for it, but surely there is no harm in it in a bathroom.

This is my flat. That is my toilet. If you want the seat down, put it down and don't complain to me.