One of the side effects of the covid-19 epidemic has been panic buying, with supermarket shelves being emptied of pasta, baked beans, and toilet paper. It caused me a certain amount of amusement that people should consider toilet paper to be as essential for human survival as food.

My son spent two years working in Singapore and travelling all over South-East Asia, so he has first-hand experience of the fact that over large areas of the planet, people don’t use toilet paper and never have. They use water. In the up-market office where he worked as a computational chemist, the toilets were provided with both toilet paper and a “Malay hose” for those who preferred the traditional method. I will spare you the exact details, but I Googled them and it does sound as if it takes practice to spray your backside clean without soaking your clothes. However, the result is generally acknowledged to be a cleaner rear end than using paper alone. Some of these conveniences are extremely sophisticated. A modern Japanese toilet has a sort of bidet arrangement which is electronically controlled, and if you can’t read Japanese and you press the wrong button, you can end up flooding the cubicle. I like the sound of the warm air dryer though. I found a charming Youtube video on how to do it properly.

What people used to wipe their behinds in the days before loo rolls is an interesting topic for speculation and archaeological research. Historical records come up with some appalling ideas: potsherds; washable flat sticks (“shit sticks”), stones, shells and corn cobs. Most uncomfortable. The Romans are supposed to have used a sponge on the end of a stick to clean themselves, although literary references to this are few and ambiguous. It is suggested that the sponge was used by everyone who visited the loo and washed in between in salt water or vinegar. Yuk!

Leaves, moss, raw wool and old rags are a more attractive idea. I worked for many years in a town near London with an interesting history.  During the medieval period the local monastery had a number of toilets, recorded in the abbey chronicles. The monastery buildings were mostly demolished during the Reformation, but in the 1920s a flint-lined cesspit below the toilet attached to the abbot’s lodging was excavated. It contained fragments of coarse cloth which were likely to have been used as toilet paper.

The possibilities are endless. The 16^th century satirical novel “Gargantua”, by Francois Rabelais has a chapter which explores the subject of anal cleansing in earthy fashion. In chapter XIII the young giant Gargantua tells his father about his experiments with various materials in his search for the perfect wipe.  These included such things as a young lady’s velvet mask (lovely and soft); a page’s cap (also good); leaves of various plants (mostly good); and a selection of live birds and animals including a cat, which didn’t work so well because it scratched him in a most delicate place. He finally decided that the best “torche-cul” or bum-wipe was a nice fluffy young goose with the head held between your legs.

Gargantua didn’t consider paper very efficient. It is widely recognised today that he was right, and that using toilet paper alone is not actually very hygienic. You will find a neat article on the subject, one of many, at this link to a bbc website.

Both paper and water have their disadvantages. What do you do in a country where water is hard to come by?  See Dr Jane Wilson-Howarth’s book “How to Shit Around the World. The art of Staying Clean and Healthy While Traveling” (2006 Traveler’s Tales, Books, Palo Alto) for suggestions.  The disadvantage of using paper is that it has to be disposed of afterwards. There is a famous story about Queen Victoria, who was visiting Cambridge and noticed bits of paper floating down the River Cam. She naively asked what they were, and instead of telling her the unsavoury truth, that they were toilet paper which in the days before sewage treatment ended up in many a river, she was told that they were notices forbidding bathing in the river. Even modern toilet paper needs a strong efficient flush to move it along, or your toilet will block up. When I was a young woman in Greece, many toilets had a small bin beside them for you to deposit your used loo paper, as the flush mechanism couldn’t cope with it. What a fun job emptying them must have been!