Glastonbury Toilet Cleaners’ Menthol Moments
Glastonbury Toilets- click for more
Environmental inspectors checking the toilets at this week’s Glastonbury Festival are being supplied with ‘heavy menthol’ lozenges to ‘mask the pong of the loos at the festival’.
Boston Borough Council environmental health officer Howard Williams thanked sweet manufacturer Jakemans for donating the strong mints.
“Nothing compares to Glastonbury as a festival. For one week it is the third largest city in the south west of England with more than 180,000 people attending,” he told local newspaper the Boston Herald..
“That means that there’s a lot of toilets to check, more than 5000 to be precise!” (Boston Standard)
Writing on the official site, festival organisers urged patrons to refrain from ‘peeing anywhere except in the loos. Urine can kill fish in the streams’ and detailed the numbers of Portable toilets (3,000), 1,500 ‘long drops’ (‘a Festival tradition. Lockable and open air’) and small number of ‘Flushing Toilets’ (‘for those who miss the comforts of home’.)
Their frank advice fell foul of Debretts’s somewhat confusing online advice to ‘never discuss’.
“The British have a range of euphemisms and circumlocutions for the loo: including ‘bog’ (vulgar and masculine), ‘little girls’ room’ (embarrassingly coy), ‘powdering one’s nose’ (equally coy) and ‘public conveniences’ (a bureaucratic evasion) (and archaic term) ‘spending a penny’,” the influential etiquette bible continues, adding ‘all of these terms are best avoided.’
Debretts also warn that ‘while ‘Toilet’ is the internationally recognised word, it may still raise an eyebrow in more class-conscious circles’, which could cause even more faux pas judging by a review of this year’s festival by Reuters.
“The type of people here this year are totally different from when I first came in 1995, much older,” Mark Bignell, 45, told the press agency, “but I guess at 205 pounds a ticket that’s to be expected.”
Jonty Skrufff: https://twitter.com/djjontyskrufff
