The Toilet Seat

Very early on in life I gained a healthy respect for an extremely simple yet 'sofa' comfortable piece of plastic mould, a feature that is found in most houses, public places, restaurants and in trains, planes and larger sized all-in-one camper vans! It was the toilet seat.

In times gone by (during the darker years) there were no toilet seats and people had to either suffer soil rash or chill waves from the iced up ceramic pot! Then a new day dawned and life improved immeasurably, first of wood and then of plastic the toilet seat arrived on planet earth and was here to stay! Formed, holy and curvaceous: white, cream or liberally embedded with imitation piranha fish, barbed wire or flowers - none of which go with the flow! Whatever trend, statement or poor sense of owner's humor these seats take after they are without doubt one of the most comfortable seats to find oneself sitting on and it is thus with wonder that airplane seats or McDonalds plastic bucket chairs are not fashioned around the delightful and often attractive comfort of a toilet bowl?

Despite the all pervasive comforts of the bum rest, my healthy respect is not formed from the many comfortable seats that my cheeks have rested on or a result of anything sordid or degrading but gained from using a single toilet with ten sisters for most of my informative years! I am the youngest of the gaggle: so there was no way out, no commode to hide in! I was basically scuppered from day one; as soon as I was able to raise that toilet lid and place my pecker beneath my sisters had it in for me! The argument or battle invariably revolved around the raising and lowering of the seat! They wanted it permanently down and I just kept on forgetting to lower it after having splashed and splattered freely from my stance.

In fact with so many sisters it was very hard to butt into any conversation and thus I was always being given the bums rush whether the problem was about toilet seats or not.

My arguments were constantly flushed away, there was no bottom to my sister's attitudes in dealing with my habits, so I often took my feelings to the closet were I would lick my wounds quietly!

There was basically no chance for me as regards the toilet seat and although it took many years to 'wipe me clean' I eventually and partially subconsciously came around to their way of wanting things! I lifted the toilet seat up when I needed to pee and I put it back down again after I had finished! They had the pleasure of having the mould awaiting their eager behinds without having to lean over and pull down the offending seat first!

At the age of twenty-two I stepped out into the world to experience life outside, leaving all the bull?. behind! I took with me that healthy respect of toilet seats and woman and everywhere that I went those toilet seats went back down. Yep, my sisters had won that **** fight!

But life is not so simple! I am now fifty-five and have just been made privy to some startling ****-stirring **** that has shocked me to the very cheeks of my buttocks! I live in Beijing, having resided here for twenty years, and for all that time I have continued without fail to lower seats behind me every where that I go! Every seat that I have had the pleasure of pleasuring the underside of gets lowered back to the horizontal so that any woman following after can conveniently get down to business without first having to reflect on the selfishness of man.

But my once tolerant wife can no longer keep it in. She has started to become irritable, I can't leave my pipe on the mantelpiece, can't wear my shoes inside and the latest one of "lift the toilet seat up when finished", has become a sore point between us!

Sorry, did I hear correctly? Did you say lift it up.

I felt at that point that I needed the services of a psychiatrist if not a fully-equipped hospital for mental disorders (for myself not my wife) or that I should get immediately ****-faced on whisky in some weak attempt to extricate myself from the sewer that I now seemed to be floating in! But after settling the wife down and making her realize that I was not giving her trouble, she explained this new (to me) ruling.

In Asia it is all '****-about-face' with regard to toilet seats! In Western culture the woman tends to rule the roost and so men invariably lose the battle of the toilet seat! Here in China things are slightly different. The man is the most important thing around and nothing else really counts, including the woman, the wife, the girl friend or the mother! Thus it is the duty of the lady of the house to make sure that their mans comforts are suitably catered for, including the permanent raising of the toilet seat so that when he decides to splatter he can do so without first having to raise the offending lid!

I am in permanent shock! I spent my informative years being conditioned daily to lower a piece of plastic and by the age of twenty I was prepared for the world. I spent the next twenty years acting upon my education only to find that I had been doing it completely wrong in the land that I lived. For over twenty years I have been walking around puzzling and annoying mothers and daughters after my visits.