Staying Home For Coronavirus 3 - Part One - The Great Toilet Paper Shortage and How to Make Do

Ok so, first, an apology. I had errands to do yesterday before I and my parents 'shield' ourselves in our respective houses, and as I have the underlying health condition that eats my energy, blogging had to fall by the wayside.  So it may be that I won't be very regular with posts, my best will have to be good enough, but still I apologise for being flaky. I can't do anything about it, so we all have to live with it.

Now onto today's post - the Great Loo Paper Shortage and what to do about it. Sigh. Frankly we shouldn't even be having one. If everyone just bought the NORMAL amount of goods they usually buy, the supply chain can cope. Now people have panic bought and continue to do so, the shops are going to have to squeeze on the rationing of what can be bought so the supply chain can catch up, but that's a whole other blog post!

So onto personal hygiene. Today I managed to find a picture to erm, brighten up the post. It's a sex worker using a bidet after a client. It's also a print so it's in black and white. It is however a picture. So, no complaining!...

Edgar Degas - Le Bidet - from Mimes de Courtesanes de Lucien book in the National Gallery of Australia

Ok. So. Let's talk Sewers and safe waste disposal and safe water supplies (I know that many places in the world don't have these even in the developed world, Flint for example in the USA has very unsafe drinking water but I'm in the UK and we do).

A brief History of Sewers - the earliest known sewers seem to have been around 2,500BC (that's 4,500 years ago) in what is now Iraq at Eshunna. Many of those 'fertile crescent' countries were far more advanced that the West was even a hundred years ago in terms of public health and hygiene provision (of course many also won't have been). The Minoans (current Crete), Persians (Iran), Athenians, Macedonians, and Greeks (Greece  & Turkey area), and the Indus Valley (Pakistan) also had some form of closed sewer that were significantly more sophisticated than what followed with future civillisations/empires for thousands of years. The Romans had the Cloaca Maxima, an open sewer system that also eventually had cesspools.

Then  the Western Roman empire fell (Romans marched out and abandoned the UK in around 400AD ish) whilst the Eastern Empire carried on, morphing into the Ottoman Empire which existed virtually in living memory, and, for some reason which escapes me, Christian Europe during the Dark Ages that followed, decided that filthy was the way forwards. (I doubt it was a concious decision, I suspect everyone was struggling to survive and people died so often that new ideas didn't have a chance to be passed on, in modern African countries plagued by HIV and AIDs for example, if the population can't read, knowledge is lost and hand to mouth living does not allow for the luxury of time spent thinking and fiddling with innovation).

A brief History of waterborne diseases - and what happened during the period of poor sanitation? Death and disease. Cholera, dysentry and typhoid epidemics amongst others as well as the Black Death (fleas on rats feasting on readily available waste). And very very smelly and unhealthy towns! The Crusaders (11th & 12th centuries) rampaging around the Near East (Israel, Baltic states, Jordan, Palestine etc) rediscovered the joys of sanitation and cleanliness, and slowly the West began to adopt primitive plumbing.

Then came the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment - cities began to fill up and sprawl, disease and poverty was rife, and then in the 1850s action finally began to be taken in London.

Being cynical I'd say that humans tend to not worry about consequences to other people, only consequences that affect themselves (a prime example of this is why I'm writing this post in the first place - panic buying of toilet paper/loo roll. Seriously guys? sheesh!) This is not new.

London 1850s, the ancient Palace of Westminster burned down and the great and the good decided they needed to spend public money on an overly complicated and expensive new seat of power - Pugin's Houses of Parliament. Which they placed right next to the Thames. Seriously, it's so close you could fall in if you unwarily leaned out of the window!

And at the time the Thames wasn't so much a river as an increasingly slow moving open sewer. And in the summer of 1858 two weeks of exceptionally hot weather and suddenly the whole city was suffering from the Great Stink. In particular, the politicians in Westminster were specifically suffering the conditions the working classes/poor people had been living in for years. And cholera took hold as the sheer volume of cesspits and flushable loos was infecting the water table with effluent and poisoning the drinking water from shallow wells and the river.  Action had to be taken!

So Joseph Bazalgette was commissioned to create sewers to remove the Great Stink and reduce the typhoid and cholera risk in London, which eventually happened.

If you're interested in this sort of history, here's 2 articles that are an entertaining read
Open University https://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/engineering-technology/how-london-got-its-victorian-sewers#
Grey Water Action https://greywateraction.org/history-sewers/


All well and good - but why are we digressing into history like this? Well, at times when what we usually use isn't available, humans can be a bit well, careless with what they do next.

The point is that the sewers are OLD. They are NOT set up to deal with the plastics and strong materials we commonly use in modern life.

Let's talk Fatbergs!

What are Fatbergs? Well they're a mass made up of anything and everything that people put down the toilet or into the system (say down the kitchen sink if your pipes lead into the sewers rather than surface water drainage (an external drainpipe into a soakaway).

The Museum of London who have a fascinating article about Fatbergs which is they actually have as an exhibit say they're made of this -

"cooking fat, condoms, needles, wet wipes, and of course human waste. "

Museum of London Fatberg Article https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/exhibiting-fatberg-monster-whitechapel

And the relevance now? Well, if people can't use Loo Roll, they're going to start using kitchen towel, newspaper, wet wipes etc and most of us feel a bit weird about what to do with these supposedly disposable items covered in human waste, and it feels right to put them down the loo. But it's not. It's not right at all.

What's my biggest fear in this Pandemic?

It's not the coronavirus. It's that people will clog up the sewers and break them, leading to additional work for Water Companies who may run out of people to fix them - that sewage is backed up into houses, an inability to use our toilets and an enormous public health hazard of both increased coronavirus (as way more is shed into faeces that with normal flu - can't find the back up for that right now, but will locate it and add it) but also an enormous variety of transmissible diseases not seen in the UK in any great number since we got our public health system of sewers and clean water.

What's worse is, that often blockages happen on your own property, overflowing not into the street or soaking into the surrounding soil, but backing up into YOUR house. Frankly that's not an experience I'd fancy myself!

Today there's articles on it - so I started this 3 days ago thinking I was ahead of the curve, but no, the curve beat me to it! The BBC here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-51980820

So today's message is STOP! THINK! Don't put anything other than wee, poo and actual toilet paper down the loo. Be responsible for everyone's sake and don't break our sewers! If you aren't sure what can be put down and what can't, google is your friend! Search for information about what can be put into a septic tank - because they're fragile creatures and need more care than our main sewer system, so if you want to be super safe, treat your loo as though it runs into a septic tank. If you are feeling a bit more sanguine, just stick to ONLY wee, poo and loo roll.

The next post in my series on the Great Toilet Paper shortage (probably Monday) is about suggestions of alternatives to loo roll, and how to handle those safely so there's no risk (or smell) in your house.

In the meantime, the short version is - Put your disposable poo or wee stained alternatives into a plastic rubbish bag lined bin like they do in many other countries (you may have come across this on holiday), and tie it up, keep it in the house for 72 hours to allow any viruses to die, then put it in the household kerbside bin. Why 72 hours? because that's what is advised for carers who use non flushable items with incontinent disabled people as a matter of course.

Please be careful! Please follow the advice of your Government. I know we all feel a bit silly self isolating or social distancing when noone is obviously unwell - and that is the issue, people can spread Coronavirus before they are showing symptoms - it's not silly, it's literally a matter of life and death if not for us individually, but for those a few degrees of separation away.