August 15th – Just like Humpty Dumpty, I’m going to fall. And I’m sitting on top of the world, Just rolling along, rolling along.

Cleaned myself: adherent to asceticism
Monkey see, monkey do: 0
Tics: hu hu hu hu hu hu hu. I know what I’m doing.
Believe in God? Get the fuck out of here
YTLH: 1 under observation

As soon as mother saw the respective Dear Leaders shaking hands in the DMZ between the Koreas, she immediately adopted the term DUZ for the bathroom. Within a week, the super-absorbent, quick drying, pedestal contour rugs were gone and a new daily regime instituted. She made a reference to it again the other day, whereupon her husband contemptuously rolled his eyes and shook his head. I still don’t know whether it was aimed at me or was seeking comradely support. I’ll tell you what though, in the three-horse-race to be Alpha Dog here, I have gained crucial intelligence to give me an edge over him.

As soon as the new regime had been announced, I experienced a moment of personal enlightenment. ‘Why not sit?’ a) it is a far more satisfactory arrangement full stop, and should not have been denied us for all these years; b) nobody knows what you get up to once you’re in there; and c) it delivers to mother’s stated initiative. Men the world over have just accepted the conditioning since time immemorial, and it takes a brave soul to make the jump. It’s not quite like adding an S (sitter) to the LGBQT list, but you know what I mean.

But once you have – the liberation, the comfort, the confidence. For the first few weeks I really believed that an elicit activity so wrong as this; so comfortable yet so long prohibited, must bring with it a cost – like sitting too often in the prone position so that crucial parts of your viscera would fall out through your anus, because your body has too long known that assuming this position required of it but one function. But after a while you settle to it, and soon declare yourself at one with the sisterhood.

It’s not fool-proof though. On rising you might still soil the seat. It’s an inevitable aspect of the male condition. I was reading one of mother’s magazines the other day, and a reader’s letter had asked, ‘what exactly is it that men do down there? Do they shake or use a tissue?’ Now, I know that I have a large following amongst the feminists here, so in the interests of evolution I’ll share – the reader was coming at it from the wrong angle – it is more akin to taking the kinks out of a garden hose. Hence, rising from a sitting position can undo all the good you’ve done in but a short motion. Then there’s the time that a night-time ablution might see you inadvertently aim at the gap between seat and rim and do a much worse job to pyjama and floor than could ever have been managed under the old system.

So, I knew I had an edge on him, apart from the odd transgression, which by and large I had dealt with well; but it wasn’t enough. Things were said, which I knew were attributable to him alone, but the question was proving it.

My women friends may wish to avert their eyes at this point, when I report that progress, as it always does, has been staring us in the face for centuries. There is hardly a man alive who will not find himself at the perfect height for cutting out the middle man and adopting the sink as receptacle. Think about it, everything’s captured, you can clean as you go, and certain aspects of both porcelain and body will get a more regular and thorough going over than that to which they are used.

It’s one of the reasons that I now live in the shed, albeit that it only runs out to a soak-away, not the sewage. The other business is another matter but egg-bound, the urge is not currently there. There has been some anticipated decay from the quails eggs, but insufficient to bring the experiment into doubt (I write to you now in the elevated position of the vessel of two undigested hen’s eggs).

If I can keep myself out of mother’s bathroom for two weeks or so and make that point known, there seems to me to be only one man who can fall by this new dictat of hers. And I, of course, as someone who has learnt to settle for comfort over responsibility as he grows older, will do a lovely job as a number two.

Thanks to Shannon Van Den Heuvel for the pic.