Unusual weather bulletin - TEP newswire

There is a yellow disc in the sky. It burns.

The challenge of our generation

First we had global cooling. Then we had global warming. Now we have super global warming.

What we actually need is a grand unified theory of the environment.

The flush

I’ve had a very fortunate upbringing. This was largely due to the incredibly stressful and work filled life of my father during my childhood and early adulthood. It meant that I grew up in a nice house, with nice things. We had nice toys, nice holidays, a nice kitchen, a nice dining room, a nice bathroom and nice toilets. Plural. We’ve always had more than one toilet.

Then I left home to go to University and, eventually, my mother and father were left alone. My father gave up work, his health improved and my parents house entered that period where further decoration and modernisation ceases mainly due to lack of funds, lack of desire and basically a lack of need. The frozen age that most houses go through. The one that estate agents label in need of modernisation.

By today’s standards the interior of my parents house would still be judged as satisfactory, if not nice, in a dated 1970’s-1980’s crossover silvery kind of way. The toilets however are exceptional.

You see these toilets flush properly. They were built and installed during a time where water preservation was, well, never really thought about. An age before the recycling of tin cans, the recycling of newspapers and the recycling of catastrophic ice age theories.

They hold a massive amount of water in their tanks and deliver it, on demand, in one sudden and decisive discharge. No evidence of what went before remains behind. One flush one outcome. No more poopy.

In comparison, every toilet that I have owned is a joker. A pale impostor. An amateurish performer. The day of the single effective flush has, along with my childhood, long since passed.

You see since the heyday of the toilet we have seen the rise of the eco warrior and from a small and humble beginning they have effectively touched upon nearly every aspect of our consumerism. Water consumption and, more specifically, water consumption by toilet did not pass under their radar.

Now don’t get me wrong, much of what the eco warrior caste has done to our consumerist ways had been reasonable, though often inconvenient, and I am sure that an example will come to mind quite soon. However, when it comes to the flush they have all but devastated a once proud toilet industry. The need to conserve water has, somehow, overtaken in importance the need to effectively flush clean the toilet bowl first time, every time.

The desire of the eco warrior to maintain our water supply in a closed system has lead to the development of smaller capacity cisterns, twin flush diaphragm systems, short hold and long hold flush options that don’t work and, quite probably, electronic ignition. The result has been the quiet replacement of the traditional flushing toilet with the non-flushing variety.

Well, I suppose that’s a little unfair. They do flush, but not enough. The actual result of the meddling of the warrior is exactly the opposite of what they intended. Multiple flushes are now par for the course, if you know what I mean, and overall water consumption by toilet is quite likely to have increased. If at first you don’t succeed and all that.

Annoying, isn’t it?

There is a chance that from now on every time you flush without achieving the desired results you will think of me. As you contemplate the flotsam and jetsam that lies in your bowl your thoughts may briefly turn to The England Project. A disturbing but perhaps not wholly inappropriate situation. But I urge you to remember who is really to blame. The eco warrior. The evangelical environmentalist.

That poopy in the toilet bowl is their fault. Never let them forget it.