Last week, my bestie/housemate Lynne and I were just enjoying a normal evening, watching our favourite TV programmes, when the happiness was shattered by an opening statement: “Vicki, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something… ”
That was quickly followed by: “… to do with my bathroom.”
My God. It was worse than I thought. Was the sink falling off the wall? Was the shower not draining? Houston, did we have an effluence problem??
I braced myself for whatever unexpected expense was about to come down the pike, but it was none of these things.
“I like to have the toilet roll with the paper coming over the top – not dropping down from behind… ,” she said. “The toilet paper can hang two ways, you see [warming to her subject, yet somewhat womansplainin’]. I think you’ve been taking it off the holder, then replacing it the wrong way.”
Well, then it kicked off. First of all, I rarely use that bathroom, and even when I do, I don’t ever recall doing what she was accusing me of. I mean, we’ve got climate change, COVID and, thus far, no sign of Kate McKinnon on season 47 of ‘SNL’. Far bigger things to worry about.
As I went to dial my lawyer, I boggled at the fact that 30 years of friendship was about to end over The Great Loo Paper Caper.
Okay, perhaps not, but the situation was grave, nevertheless. I was so aggrieved that I waited until she had turned in for the night, then snuck into her bathroom and replaced the roll of Charmin with Bounty kitchen towel. With a particularly devious final flourish, I also ensured that the paper was hanging down behind.
Don’t. Mess. With. Me.
In the days that followed, I attempted to drive support for myself – or gain a greater understanding of why Lynne was so perturbed by the clockwise vs. anti-clockwise dispensing method – by broaching the subject with others on social media. I was surprised to find that, overall, most people had quite strong opinions on the topic. Almost everyone was in complete agreement with Lynne, and the remainder had no horse in the race. My friend Selma went as far as to say it was “a mortal sin” in her house to have the paper hanging any other way than over the roll. Lana had a graphic that covered both scenarios, which stated that Lynne’s way implied a person was “faithful, logical, and sensible”, while the ‘highway’ labelled the perpetrator “a heedless fool with a skewed perception of reality”.
Crikey. We could surmise all that from such a simple test? Had the future of a relationship been decided using this method?
“I’m going to let her use my toilet. If she comes out, and the paper is perched over the roll, I’m buying a ring. If it’s hanging down behind, I’ll say I’m going out for pizza and never come back.”
Keen to see where this fascinating line of inquiry would continue taking me, I managed to insert myself into a conversation at a party – always fertile ground for such discussions. I waited until everyone was happily tucking into their food before launching into the TP debate. Once again, participants either didn’t care or recoiled in horror at the notion of under-not-over. There was a brief hiccup when one guest asked, understandably, “Okay, I’m eating – where exactly is this leading?” But once he was convinced that we were keeping the lively chat confined to an inanimate object in its natural resting place, he relaxed and turned back to the task at hand.
That being said, the scope did expand into the heady world of brand names, plies, and good marketing vs. genuine medical benefits. Was Charmin an industry leader, or did Cottonelle – with its rippled texture – put that family of bears firmly in second place?
Charmin boasts a ‘MEGA’ product (Ultra-Soft, of course), that is four-rolls-in-one. Where would one hang such a thing? Surely it would be wedged up against the paintwork in a wall-mounted sitch’ation, causing untold misery for anyone who dared indulge in a vindaloo. They’d be peeling and ripping off a painful quarter-inch of paper at a time until the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode into town.
Which brings us to the next sub-topic: Two-ply or not two-ply?
No one in my test group was a fan of the one-ply idea. That’s the stuff you might find at campsites when you forgot to take your mother’s advice on what to pack. Two-ply is pretty standard in the better brands, but why settle for that, when there might be exceptional out there in the world?
I went down the rabbit hole, and discovered that Quilted Northern sells Ultra Plush ‘Supreme’ rolls that promise “cushiony and absorbent layers”. Sounds like they could double as a pillow or cushion, in a pinch.
Reel, a company I’d never previously heard of, calls their three-ply “the Cadillac” of toilet paper. Oo! What does that make one-ply? A Yugo? They also claim it offers the consumer “the lushest experience on the market”. Compared to what, I’d like to know. I treasure my moments alone with the porcelain throne as much as the next person, but I’d be hard-pressed to see it elevated to a ‘lush experience’.
Like everyone trying to outdo each other on bedsheet thread counts, I wonder if somewhere, out there (cue the theme music from ‘An American Tail’), someone is working on a breakthrough four-ply product that will be touted as the Lamborghini of Loo Roll or the Tesla of Toilet Paper. The car comparisons are endless.
As if all this wasn’t enough, you then bring curveballs like aloe into the mix, designed to clean and soothe at the same time. How did we ever wipe without it?
Actually, we did, and then some.
In the middle of this extraordinary deep-dive, my dear friend Betsy reminded me of the IZAL Medicated Toilet Tissue which cornered the market in the UK’s public facilities for many years. “Tissue” had to be a play on words, as it had the consistency of anything but. Resembling the kind of material in which our parents used to wrap our schoolbooks to protect them in ye olden dayes, mixed with a hint of parchment paper, it was as absorbent as aluminum foil and about as yielding. Need a bit of tracing paper? Not a problem; just get yourself a few sheets of IZAL and you were sorted. Another friend said they wrote a complete letter on the stuff. Try doing that with a piece of three-ply Quilted Northern.
When they say the British are a hardy lot, they are probably referring to anyone who survived the IZAL years, lived to tell the tale and can still walk normally.
Now, some readers may wonder if toilet paper is really a suitable subject to be discussing in any kind of forum, but why not? The cat’s out of the bag – we all use it. We also apparently consider it to be a go-to hoarding item when any crisis emerges. I, for one, want to make sure I have 50 MEGA rolls of three-ply in the house when the murder hornets get here.
Maybe in these troubling times, when there seem to be so many issues in the world, one of the few familiar comforts we can cling to is a decent roll of TP. Whatever separates and divides us can be overcome, because although we are all different, one truth remains constant: Everyone appreciates a clean bum.
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