A Little Boys' Tale.

I read today that the Indian Government has recently completed a programme of providing rural areas with latrines in the hope of persuading the locals to stop defecating out in the open. Such a practice was deemed to be not only insanitary, but also inappropriate behaviour for modern humans in the modern world. I suppose India wants to modernise in depth, and why not?

It isn’t working, apparently. Old habits die hard and the indigenous populations of the nether regions continue to exercise their personal nether regions in places where somebody might tread in the result. The government is not amused, and has started sending monitors out to encourage compliance. Unfortunately, the report omitted to say just how the monitors are doing their monitoring, which is a pity because I find this sort of thing really rather amusing.

And therein lies the paradox. I always find toilet tales funny, in spite of the fact that I find bodily functions about as funny as a nasal abscess which has just burst in furtherance of a particularly powerful sneeze and deposited unwholesome residue in parts of the room which are difficult to access.

I’m tempted to suspect that this is some sort of neurotic displacement device (which I imagine I’m quite good at) resulting from a childhood trauma of which I have no memory. Alternatively, I might just never have grown up.