Toilet Of The Week (16)
Four new facilities have recently popped up on the streets of Paris for the convenience of upstanding members of the city, residents and visitors alike.
The uritrottoirs are open-air urinals, painted red, fully exposed on street corners – rather like the British phone box of blessed memory – and are signed with a helpful illustration as to how to use them. The Parisians think of everything!
Advocates claim they are eco-friendly, with flower boxes on top of them and a straw layer which eliminates those stale odours. The waste will be dumped in parks and gardens.
The French seem to have a thing about pissoirs, just think of Clochemerle, and their introduction in areas popular with tourists has caused a bit of a stink. We will follow this with interest.
Meanwhile, in Blighty we seem to be going out of our way to encourage urination in the streets.
Public carseys are almost as rare as a sane commentator on Brexit. According to a recent survey, Councils have pulled the chain on around 13% of these worthy institutions since 2010 and Cornwall, that tourist magnet which the Chairman of Visit Cornwall has urged tourists to avoid, has stopped maintaining 94% of their facilities. The best place to go to ensure a visit to a public toilet that is open is the Highlands where there are 92 of them.
Interestingly, 233 councils and police force areas don’t have any by-laws prohibiting public urination and of the 180 that do, 112 don’t enforce them. The number of incidents that the police responded to has halved since 2010 and fewer than ten result in public order offences.
It makes you think. Vive la difference!
