If a man’s home is his castle, then it follows that his toilet is his throne. It’s hard to leave the kingdom, to try out other toilets in places you don’t trust, or among people who may mean you harm. But sometimes, out there in the big bad world, a King’s gotta do, what a King’s gotta do: a King’s gotta poo.

Here’s a quick and handy guide to some of the bathrooms you might find yourself having to poo in over the course of your life, with an honest appraisal of the risks and dangers, and the obstacles you might have to overcome.

It all starts in primary school…

Dropping the kids off at School

Like a cat forced to use a litter tray inside a kennel of angry Jack Russells, the boy who poos at school is quite correct to feel scared. Nothing in this world excites the same level of primal violence in a group of primary school boys than one of their number going for a shit. Something about the spiritual nakedness and vulnerability of that act triggers their blood-lust, and the mere suggestion of it happening somewhere in their vicinity sends them howling off round the school like chimps on a hunt. They sniff the air. They beat their chests. A Mexican wave of excitement clatters through the playground. Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, come see the amazing… shitting… boy! It feels like VE Day. The kids erect stalls, arrange a tombola, they sing, they dance, and before you know it Doris Day’s up on top of a bin belting out ‘The White Shits of Rover’. It’s literally the best thing that’s ever happened to the school, with the possible exception of that day a dog got into the playground.

“Quick! Davey’s doing a shhiiiiiiiiiiiiiitttttttt!”

This certainly isn’t the best thing that’s ever happened to the boy foolish enough to answer nature’s call away from the safety and sanctity of his family bathroom. The hunters lock in on his location, and swoop in to the main building; they track, surround and mount his flimsy cubicle, laying siege to it with shrieks and roars as the frightened little shitter inside begs for them to stop, and perhaps even tries to subdue them with the toilet brush. It’s like the Wicker Man with noise instead of fire. This boy’s crime? First degree turd-er. He’s paying for the collective bodily shame of the whole class.

He’ll never shit at school again, and if he’s ever tempted he’ll have his new, life-long nickname to dissuade him: he’ll never be known by any other name than ‘Jobby Boy’ until he’s at least 17.

For some reason you could take a piss at school without attracting much heat or ridicule; unless, of course, you made the mistake of going for a piss in the cubicle. Oh dear. If you did that could expect to be handed the hereditary title of ‘gay for life’, and hounded for the rest of your days. Gay was a more prevalent insult back then, you see, because Central Scotland in the early-to-mid 1980s wasn’t the, ah… enlightened… cosmopolitan…em, paradise… it is today? Hysterical parents everywhere wanted to protect their boys from the would-be gays in their midst, and knew of no better way to do it than to steer them towards the more wholesome things in life, like tits in their dad’s newspaper, drinking until you pass out, and Jimmy Savile.

Such was the impeccable logic of Scottish schoolboys in the 1980s that the boy they’d hold up as the gayest was the one who not only got himself as far away as possible from all other penises while in the bathroom, but actually sealed himself inside a giant penis-proof box. ‘Hey!’ a boy would shout as he pounded on the cubicle door from outside, ‘I can hear you pissing in there! If you don’t want to be called gay, you’ll bloody well come out of that cubicle and show me your cock… and then you’ll have a fucking good look at my cock, by God!’

Chod on the Road

(PS: FYI if you’re not Scottish: ‘Chod’ means ‘jobby’)

(PPS: ‘Jobby’ means ‘shite’)

Let’s do some quick maths. In your average public lavatory consisting of three cubicles, approximately three-out-of-every-three seats in those cubicles will be covered in drips, crescents, loops and lakes of the very yellowest of piss. The piss will often be accompanied by a bold, bristly sprinkling of pubes and arse-hairs. Mmmmm. Delicious. Would sir care for some herpes with his defecation? And the bowl beneath your arse will usually be beskidded with the kind of splatter patterns only Dexter could decipher. Or it’ll have a jobby bobbing in it, like a brown olive in the world’s most disgusting cocktail.

If you do happen to stumble upon an immaculately clean seat, you’re more wary of it than you would be a piss-stained one. The other two are filthy, says a suspicious little voice inside your head. So why is this one gleaming? What foul secrets hide behind the invisible barrier around this bog that can only be exposed with the aid of a UV lamp and plenty of luminol? Your brain imagines the worst. Did a tramp piss everywhere and then have his trusty dog lick up the evidence? Or vice versa? Did an old man wipe down the seat with one of his socks after his largest hemorrhoid burst open like a firework during a particularly gnarly shit?

Public shitting is the most dangerous activity this side of running along the banks of the Nile baiting crocodiles with your blood-basted bollocks. Most people would rather crap in a bush, take a ten-mile taxi-ride home, hold it in until they’re half crippled, or simply shit themselves, than risk sitting on a public toilet-seat. Only those with nothing left to lose would ever contemplate letting their bare thighs thunk down onto a public pan. The sanest option, if pushed, is for a man to hover above the water like a Lancaster Bomber, dropping payloads from up high, and taking the shitty splash-back like a man.

Possibly the worst breed of public toilet is the one you’ll find inside a nightclub toilet. The lavvies in your average nightclub play host to more cum, cocaine and fecal matter than an evangelical preacher’s cock. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the locks on the cubicle doors are usually bust, so you have to shit like you’re playing Twister – one foot held out, both hands ready – in case some drunk asshole barges into your space when you’ve got a mitt-full of shitty toilet-paper.

The Toilet on a Train

Enough said.

Plop, Plop. Who’s There?

Provided you can find a pube-and-piss-free throne to perch your ass upon, nothing beats a good shit at work. The toilets are a lot more sanitary owing to a regular cleaning schedule, and the finite, measurable number of bum-cheeks on site that could potentially occupy them. Plus, there’s no phone in there. No emails. No bosses. No command structure. No pressure. For five or so blessed, blissful minutes of your hectic day, there’s nothing but you and the poo.

But never let yourself be lulled into a false sense of security. You know as well as I do that  one creak of that bathroom door, one flurry of footsteps, and you’re locked inside that cubicle like a rat in a trap, possibly until the end of time.

When we step out of that cubicle immediately post-poo we want the bathroom to be empty. It doesn’t matter if somebody walks in as we’re washing our hands – even if our stink is hanging in the air like mustard gas, we can still chat away with whoever walks in, even reference our own ungodly stench with a smile and a shrug of the shoulders. But being seen exiting that stall? Unthinkable. The equivalent of being snapped by the paparazzi on your way out of court for an animal sex-crime.

Everybody shits. We know that; it’s one of life’s great levellers. There’s certainly no shame in defecation. We should be bolshy, proud. After a shit we should be bursting the door open from the inside like an FBI agent raiding a drug den and greeting whoever’s out there with steely resolve, or strolling through the door like we’re emerging from the smoke on an episode of Stars in Their Eyes dressed like Johnny fucking Cash. We do a shit: we don’t take shit. In reality, though, when faced with intrusion in the bathroom we hold back. We clam up. Maybe we’re still haunted by the nickname we were given in primary school…

Anyway, you know the drill. One hint of the outside door creaking open while you’re inside that cubicle, and all plopping, wiping and polishing ceases immediately. You become like Tom Cruise in the first Mission Impossible movie, held in suspended animation, frightened to breathe. ‘Just fuck off,’ you plead under your breath. But another person comes in. And another. And another. And another. It’s a convention. A stampede.

And then the unthinkable happens: ‘You going to be long in there?’ comes a voice from outside. An answer is demanded. Your identity is demanded. What can you do?

There’s only one thing you can do. You shrink to the size of a vole and swim down the U-bend to safety, dragging your jobbies behind you.

New You, New Poo

It’s great to spend the night with a girl at her place; sharing a bed and each other’s bodies, then waking up naked and sated in the half-light of the next morning. What isn’t great is waking up in that half-light absolutely bursting on a shite. If your relationship is very new then that bouncing blurble in your stomach, if allowed to evolve into a monstrous doo-doo, could sound the death knell for your union.

It’s probably a smart idea to avoid creating a mental connection in the mind of your good lady between you number one, the sexual harpsichord that’s fun to play, and you number two (literally), the man who’s devastated her living area with the gagging stench of egg in the wake of a particularly oily shit. Take it from me: best not to shit in the same post-code area, much less the same house or flat. Only a German would consider that an aphrodisiac.

When I was a student in Aberdeen I dated a girl who lived in student accommodation ten minutes down the hill from mine’s. Most nights when I stayed over I’d wake up very early the next morning a sweating, shaking, bagged-up mess, and would have to spend long, dark hours gritting my teeth to dust as I willed a jobby back up my intestinal tract like a priest conducting a violent reverse exorcism of his bowels. I couldn’t let her smell my splatter. Worse still, she shared a flat with three other girls, any one of whom could have emerged from the shadows at any given moment to inhale my heady anal perfume – Eau de Dead Dog’s Colon. I’d have to find excuses to leave her flat at half five in the morning, which isn’t an easy thing to do without coming across like some love rat who’s sneaking out early so he can get the kids he hasn’t told you about ready for school. I think I started scraping the bottom of the barrel before long:

“Where are you going at this time of the morning?”

“I’VE GOT A BIG TABLE-TENNIS MATCH LATER!”

“But you’ve never even talked about table-tennis once in all of th…”

“I’M A WORLD CHAMPION, BYE.”

I’d stagger up that hill like the world’s angriest Parkinson’s sufferer, shouting and cursing as I went, kicking bins, telling squirrels to fuck off. Then I’d arrive home and do a poo that would trigger such an exquisite feeling of relief that I’d write poems about it – in one case an award-winning three-act play that was a huge smash on Broadway.

After that first giddy year, and especially once you’ve moved in with a girl, all restraint goes down the pan. It becomes perfectly normal to catch a waft of each other’s botty parcels, to hear the plips and plops of a poo in progress, even to bloody well shit in front of each other. It’s best just to embrace this when it happens, have fun with it. My partner and I regularly play a game called ‘But Who Can Shit the Fastest?’, and have side-by-side contests, with one of us using the bath. Now THAT’S sexy.