Imagine this for a moment. It’s another beautiful summer’s day, the sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and you are down at the park with a group of your closest friends kicking the old soccer ball around. Soon to be enjoying a long summer’s evening, you will likely find yourself down at the local pub ending the day’s game with a cold one amongst your pals, not a care in the world. Life is good.
All of a sudden a play begins to unfold, your buddy on the other team passes it to his teammate, but his back is turned to you so it’s your time to strike! You race up and slide on in there knocking the ball out of his control and directly to one of your teammates making a wonderful defensive play. Perhaps the best of the game in fact.
Now imagine that you stand up with that feeling of being on top of the world, but then you look down because something feels a bit odd and you realize the unthinkable has happened: you managed to slide right across a large, wet pile of dog crap (or perhaps worse even), and you now have it on your forearm. Ugg!
You head for the sideline disgusted, but not dismayed because immediately after disaster struck, you recalled that you planned ahead and packed a roll of toilet paper with your stuff. So you head for your bag, pullout the roll, tear off a few squares, clean the poo from your forearm and you’re good to go. Back on the field you go as though nothing ever happened. Right?
Of course not!
Any sane person would be desperately looking for the nearest source of running water, would be hoping to god there is hot water, and with any luck a good supply of quality soap! So what makes us think this is an acceptable scenario when it comes to our daily duty? Out of sight out of mind perhaps?
There are a wide variety of butt washers I’ve come across in my travels: Turkey’s built in nubby aimer, Egypt’s hooky add on, the French’s bath-like bidet, Thailand’s shower nozzle with trigger (a good gateway washer), Malaysia’s nozzleless hose, and then of course the universal truck stop vat of water with plastic bowl (I will admit, this one still mystifies me to this day) – all of which are undeniably more sanitary than our lowly t.p.
The big question people usually throw at me is, “How do you dry off after??”, and the answer to that is with a little practice, there ends up being very little splash back, and the little there is is far better than spending a day with potential razor blade ass.
I’ve discussed the mighty bum gun with a number of fellow travellers in the past, and our experiences have been pretty much the same – you try it for the first time with a “when in Rome…” sort of attitude (or perhaps you had no choice!), but once you’ve gotten used to the routine, you really never want to go back.
I shall leave you with a quote from the 16th century French writer Francois Rabelais:
“Who his foul tail with paper wipes, shall at his bollocks leave some chips”.
Hear, hear!