wc

This café used to be a semi-regular hangout, but my patterns of moving through the day have changed, and it has changed owners several times. It is no longer familiar.

And an unfamiliar café w.c. can be disconcerting. This one now features a roll of toilet paper chained and padlocked to a metal rail as if it were a junkyard dog or an escape risk. The paper is faintly damp, the result, I assure myself, of ambient humidity (it is raining outside), but this fact causes me to reflect upon how distressing almost any moisture is when encountered in a public toilet. Unless actively flowing from the tap, it is universally unwelcome: on the floor, on the countertop, standing in the sink, dripping from the door handle, to say nothing of more fraught places. We will go to great lengths to avoid coming in contact with it, and the set of problems that attends this desire is exactly what toilet paper is intended to help you with.

But as a helpfully-located grafitto reminds me:

Who needs toilet paper when you have fingers?

A later hand offers the imprecation:

eco-weenie Mac user

which takes me a moment to parse. Another wit has rejoined with:

Who needs fingers when you have a tongue?

On the facing wall, I am greeted by twelve lines of holocaust denial in rhyming couplets, of which the first line reads: ho ho ho ho holocaust. It has been heavily annotated in imagined margins in numerous later hands, the owners of which take exception to the poet's spelling, grammar, and claims of fact both specific and general.

I opt to flush by pushing the lever down with one heavily booted foot. Doing this is not unsatisfying.