the brilliantly leaping gazelle

As the title suggests, this is not something to read if you are eating.

Don’t say I didn’t warned you.

They say that travel broadens the mind, and indeed it does. I’ve discovered loads of new, irrational prejudices that would’ve remained unknown to me if I stayed at home. But thankfully there are a few remaining grains of sand with which to bedevil my seaside idyll.

One of them is the ever present conspiracy of bed manufacturers. They seem incapable of comprehending the idea that some people are over 6ft tall, and as most can’t take off their legs and prop them by the side of the bed, might need a bed that allows for this. Generously, I might add. It is as much use as a cement football to make beds that are not only small, but also have restraints at the foot of them. Meaning that not only is the bed too small, you can’t even stretch your legs out over the end. You are effectively imprisoned. And why this bizarre affectation for memory foam mattresses? As far as I can tell, the only memory a memory foam mattress has is of every one who’s ever slept on it.

And bed withs are another bugbear…

But nowhere near as infuriating as toilets that are so manifestly unsuited to the task they’re meant to facilitate, it almost makes me believe in the devil and that he’s somehow possessed the minds of plumbers when they install bathrooms.

Take this morning. Without going into detail, (which means I’m about to) I prefer to toilet sitting down for both activities, and for the second of these, being able to spread my legs as far as possible. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t much care for extruding potentially very messy objects out of my body only to have them squashed together at the point of exit and make even more of a mess. (Imagine someone really tightly swashing together a Nutella sandwich. Or perhaps don’t.) I know. Silly me for not wanting to be shitty me.

But the toilet in this place has been sandwiched between a wall and the bath. Between the wall and my left leg there is but the width of two of my calves. On the right, even less, resulting in the less than edifying spectacle of me hoisting the leg into the bath and leaning over to my left to successfully complete the matter in hand. Made all the more difficult when there is a growing sense of urgency about things.

I warned you.