The Toilet!!

The lavatory pan; invented by Thomas W Crapper.

I have been here just over two weeks and it seems like a lifetime; all my pals will be thinking I've deserted them as I haven't been able to call them yet but I've been so busy travelling, rehearsing and, more than anything else, doing the logistics and publicity for my show in Edinburgh. That has been a full time job and I have spent most of my time in the position I am in at the moment that is sitting at the computer and typing.

My wife has been a bit sick and so have all the babies – sore throats, colds, the flu, tummy bugs and the like and so far I have escaped it. I have been here, there and everywhere and a word I didn't hear too much in America has raised its ugly, unattractive, naff head; the word is toilet.

There are some things I agree with the upper classes with and one of them is their abhorrence of the word; they would sooner their precious little snooty offspring use the word bog instead of toilet even the shit house.

They hate the nicety words like the little boys room, the bathroom, the rest room and the like – they prefer the loo or the correct word the lavatory; and why wouldn't they?

The Americans don't use the word toilet in the same vein as they do in the UK. They use it to describe something gone bad and I love the way they use it: My career is in the toilet etc.

So where does this terrible word come from? It came from the middle class bourgeois primary school teachers the children met when they started school - later when they went to the dentist children were asked 'do you want to go to the toilet' in a whispered voice before they met the mad psychopath with the pliers!

I hate to agree with the tiny minority of upper class people but the words they hate I hate; I mean calling a living room the lounge is the height of misguided hypocrisy carried out by the arch advocator of middle class madness Mrs Hyacinth Bucket from the TV series Keeping up Appearances; the doily user whose sister has room for a pony.

I'm not much of a hater of anything but there are some silly things the upper classes do and without the upper classes there would be no Monty Python.

The upper classes go out on very cold days for picnics; they gather around some portable stove trying to cook sausages and keep their tea warm whilst their children stand there with snot dripping from their noses, winging and crying, longing for the warmth of their cars – their houses are always cold – and dreading the food that they are about to be served.

They say Dayentry instead of Daventry, deteriate instead of deteriorate and the way they pronounce charabanc beggars belief.

Oh to be in Yiggieland, drinking Yiggelish beer!!

Next stop Edinburgh – aha Celts at last!!