Toilet cardboard vs. shitty sticks… which would you handle?

Tipped by the radiant and lovely Yvonne in Email…

As usual around this time of year they (greasy urchins’ playgroups) are asking for twigs, jam bottles, leaves and such. I was told that they are no longer able to use cardboard tubes from toilet rolls because of bacteria from bathrooms but they would like the tubes from kitchen foil, clingfilm and the like for crafts.

They’re okay with twigs and leaves which will inevitably be covered with all kinds of insect shit and might have been peed on by a fox or a weasel. They’d even be happy with the twigs we, as children, used to stand upright in cow pats to make little leafless forests on Stinky Hill.

We were allowed to wallow in filth as children. It’s why we have so few autoimmune diseases now, compared to Generation Feeble who are, quite literally, being mollycoddled to death. A bored immune system really is something to worry about.

They are not okay with cardboard tubes from toilet rolls because they might have ‘bathroom bacteria’ on them. There is no such thing. If they were honest they’d call them ‘arsebugs’ because that’s what they are really scared of. They aren’t scared of the multiple threats from twigs and leaves because that’s nature, and nature is allowed to be covered in shit. It’s natural so it’s safe shit.

There are very few bacteria in a properly maintained bathroom. You know it’s the highest risk room in the house so it gets hit with every chemical in your cleaning arsenal. You use chemicals in the toilet you’d never dream of using to clean cutlery. Deadly chemicals, things that can’t be left in the toilet bowl too long or they’ll etch the porcelain.

Most toilet seats these days are plastic or varnished wood. I haven’t seen bare wood ones since primary school and even we shabby filthy kids tried to avoid using those. It was a kind of instinct, I suspect. Bare wood is impossible to get bacteria-free unless you burn it or soak it in a bucket of creosote. Varnished wood or plastic just needs surface disinfecting.

Steel seats are a possibility, but not in Scotland because in winter you might find it hard to stand up afterwards.

Any impervious surface is easily rendered clean. You can use things that even Father Jack wouldn’t drink to wipe it down. Porous surfaces in bathrooms are high risk.

The little cardboard tube in the middle of the toilet roll is porous so the logic of the simple says it has to be high risk. However, you don’t wipe your arse with it unless you are

a) clinically insane,

b) have run out of paper and have nothing else within reach,

c) are exceptionally tight-fisted or

d) just like the feel of cardboard.

None of these would lead to you donating said cardboard tube to the horrors of youth unless you really, really don’t like them. Even then, I doubt even modern children would try to make anything out of a soggy, misshapen, stinky shit covered cardboard lump.

A normal cardboard arsepaper tube is low risk unless you ran out of paper and changed the roll without bothering to wash the brown sticky bits off your fingers first. Maybe that’s common among the young, I don’t know.

I remember, as a child, making Christmas decorations that looked a bit like a candle at school. We had to bring in our own toilet roll card tube and didn’t think it in any way creepy or odd. “This is the card tube. I wiped shit off my arse with the rest of it, and this is what’s left”. No, it never occurred to us to question it. It was just a cardboard tube.

Nobody ever died or got even slightly sick. We made shitty decorations out of the shitpaper tubes and nobody ever caught so much as an STD from it. I have wondered if maybe the parents are saying ‘Please, no more dreadful Christmas tat. We have enough.’

We did get occasional bouts of squirty bottom from playing with filthy leaves and shitty sticks, and perhaps it’s a slightly twisted good thing that those are still allowed for the horrible small ones of the modern world.

At least their immune systems are getting some exercise, despite the best efforts of modern education and progressive parents to turn them into flabby Nazi leucocytes…