There’s nothing worse than walking into a toilet cubicle after someone else has been in there. And when I say been in there, I mean ‘been’ in there.

Where I work there are 4 cubicles, all of which have motion activated lights. This makes me happy because I know that the ones with the lights on have recently been used and can therefore opt for one plunged into darkness.

However, some days you don’t get the option and today was one of those days.

I walked in and I could see that three of the doors were locked. The fourth and vacant cubicle had the light on. I walked in and my worst fears were confirmed; the water in the toilet was still moving and the cistern was filling up…this toilet had been flushed very, very recently.

Warm seat alert.

But it wasn’t the light or the swirling vortex of yuckiness that I noticed first; it was the wall of smell that hit me full on in the face, filling my nose and open mouth with the warmth of a sauna and none of the benefits. In fact, the action of opening the door caused a backdraft not unlike that of a fart under a wafted duvet. I gagged slightly as it burned my throat and eyes.

This time however, it took on a slightly different aroma than that of a rotting carcass dipped in gibbon shit. This time it also smelt of ash. Yes ash. So if you’ve ever wondered if a smoker’s turds smell any different, then the answer is yes. Why was this though? I mean, my shit doesn’t smell like any of the things I eat; although having said that I do sometimes detect a hint of coffee if I drank a lot of it that day. There’s sometimes a distinct smell of the brown stuff in the brown stuff.

This got me thinking about white dog poo. Remember those? They used to be hard, crumbly and exploded under car tyres. They were everywhere. You just don’t see them anymore so I once asked someone why that was the case, only to be told it had something to do with small quantities of ash that used to be added to dog food.

I’ve since learned it was to do with the fact that dogs used to have a higher calcium diet because they ate a lot more bones. However, due to BSE and other dodgy cock-rotting diseases that the press scared the shit out of us with, they don’t chew as many bones anymore (dogs, not the press). Plus the fact that laws on picking up after your dog have become more and more stringent in recent years. There’s nothing like seeing a dog owner picking up a freshly baked warm bum biscuit through a small, thin bag…especially when it hasn’t been baked fully.

Offering them a spoon to help scoop it into the bag never gets met with much of a sense of humour.