Toilet Etiquette

Whilst there are many deep-seated divisions in society with arguments of left-vs-right, liberalism-vs-authoritarianism and philosophical arguments on the existence of God; very few things can cause such utter vexation as to which way around the toilet roll goes on the holder.

There are two main schools of thought on this matter. The first is that the partly unravelled paper should hang down in front of the roll, thus making it easier for the next user of the bum wiping product to extract a few sheets with ease. Let us call this the arrangement of the bog roll as the “ergonomic way”:

The second school of thought is that the paper should be neatly hidden behind the roll to make an aesthetically pleasing appearance whereby the recipient will be scrabbling around for the end of the paper, cursing beneath their breath with their knickers wrapped around their ankles. Let us call this the “wrong way”:

After a quick straw poll on this matter I tended to find that it was men that preferred the “ergonomic way” whereas women would go for the “wrong way”. However, I think this is a little simplistic and in fact the real gender split is between women, who will simply shrug and pull off the required paper, and men, who will rant and rave about the “wrong way”, posting endlessly on social media about the utter inconvenience of it and even take photos to create a blog entry about the matter…

I suppose it is actually the male equivalent of women complaining about the loo seat being left up. Personally, I always put both the seat and lid down as I have lost far too many pens, spectacles and mobile phones to an unpleasant watery grave but it’s never really bothered me whether the seat is up or down when entering the lavatory as I’ll simply adjust it to suit. In fact, the only toilet etiquette that everyone agrees on is that the scratchy tracing-paper sanitary sheets that are found in public toilets are an abomination.