The cult of poo meets the low flush toilet

I have been thinking.

Now, that is not always a good thing, but I want to share the results of my thinking with you.

We are facing a crisis. A horrible crisis.

This crisis has been brought about by the intersection of two modern fads:

• The cult of the low-flush, environmental toilet
• The cult of the high fibre diet
  

These cults will intersect one day in the red triangle below, which I have dubbed the "red zone of unflushable poo". If you are in this triangle, then you are in the shit.


This idea originated in some snippet that I read somewhere about Africans having enormous stools. No, I am not talking about foot stools that you sit on - Africans in Africa drop enormous woombies when they visit the bogger. It all has to do with their poverty stricken diet, which is low in meat and high in cheap, cheap, cheap porridge, made from unprocessed grains.

Now if you are wandering around the African shrubbery and you need to dump a poo the size of a 2 litre Coke bottle*, I don't think anyone is going to care. If you are using a long drop toilet, the fact that your stool could smother a large cat is of concern to no one.

But it is a worry when you drop that load into my modern, eco-friendly, low flush toilet, and the damned thing refuses to depart for the treatment plant.

So I started thinking - what happens when a hippy installs a low flush toilet, and simultaneously changes to a high fibre, low meat diet? Is this a recipe for disaster?

Given that this hippy is likely to be a university lecturer, I don't think they will have many problems with hygene. They're going to have a number of unpleasant experiences as they try to convince the enormous product of their bowels to navigate the S-bend, but I doubt they will stop until it is all gone. Even if they have to flush their low-flush toilet 10 times, and throw a roll or two of recycled toilet paper down the toilet to assist its departure.

You may of course appreciate the irony that a high fibre diet may induce low-flush toilet users to flush and flush and flush and flush until they have used 4 or 5 times as much water as a traditional cistern would require.

What happens though when you take some refugees from somewhere like, oh, Somalia, and stick them in eco-friendly public housing with eco-friendly low-flush toilets, and they refuse to adapt to the local diet of pizza, burgers and KFC? What happens if they stick to porridge, but are not terribly familiar with the idea an S-bend?

I think I have an explanation for the recent riots in Adelaide and Melbourne. These people are angry. They are upset. They are frustrated at the way they are being treated by patronising white people. They are being treated like crap.

They want a toilet that will move their movements. They want the same rights as the rest of us - to flush once and be done with it. I am sure that the Department that is looking after them has poo-poo'd these concerns, which would only serve to inflame the matter.

We really need to get to the bottom of this.

*When I was at school, there was this thing known as the "Bilson Bomb". If you ever visited a toilet and found that it was compeletely plugged by something that resembled two 400gm baked beans cans taped end to end and painted brown, then you had encountered a Bilson Bomb. I don't know how Bilson did them. Maybe he only did one poo per week. But one thing was sure - when he did them, no amount of flushing could get rid of them. He was notorious throughout our boarding house for his blocking abilities.