Day Twenty

If all the world were paper

The Covid Crisis has brought out the worst in some people with  shoppers fighting, actually hand to hand fighting, over toilet rolls.

As far as I know, no one has descended to fisticuffs for fish, or offered violence to get the last pack of spinach or fluffy slippers.

Tissue is always the issue.

When I was a child in Bradford, the lavatory was outside and while Mum allowed us to use the po in the bedroom for early morning wee-wees, anything else meant a cold, often dark and rainy trip down the yard.

There I’d sit, dangling my little legs and screwing up pieces of newspaper to make them soft.

Typically, you had to screw and smooth a square of Telegraph & Argus six times before it achieved the requisite gentleness.

Newspaper was infinitely better than the Bronco tissue we were forced to use at school.

This shiny, rough paper, named after an untamed horse (!) was strangely non-absorbent and had the order NOW WASH YOUR HANDS! Printed on every sheet. 

It was totally unfit for purpose and its advertising slogan, ‘Bronco for the bigger wipe’ only compounded the consumers dislike of it.  

Image courtesy of the Science Museum, London.

In ancient times, depending on where you lived and when, a visit to the loo meant taking leaves, grasses, clay, moss or wood shavings (how on earth did they keep them together?) 

Other wipers included corn and maize cobs,  fruit skins, seashells, stones (ouch)  and for the wealthy English, lace, wool, cloth and, much later,  paper from books and music scores. 

I cringe to think this is why Shakespeare’s plays  were lost.

The Romans used a sponge often soaked in vinegar (or if you were  wealthy, rosewater), attached to a stick.

When I first learned about this, I wondered if this implement,  offered to Jesus on the cross was not in fact to assuage his thirst but as a kind of bizarre insult, the fore-runner of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

In many countries, even today, the left hand is used, which is why some cultures will eat only with the right.  NOW WASH YOUR HANDS!

The first people to use paper were the Chinese, the earliest known toilet paper or 衛生紙 was recorded in AD 589. 

Yan Zhitui (I promise I’m not making that name up) wrote that he dare not use any paper for wiping which contained classical Confucian texts.

During the 14th century, Emperor Hongwu’s family used 720,000 sheets (2ft x 3ft) per year of a special soft and perfumed  paper fabric in their luxurious loo.

Here he is on the throne.

It wasn’t until the 1850’s that that a  New York entrepreneur,  Joseph Gayetty produced the first commercially available sheets as, ‘The greatest necessity of the age!’  

However,  despite being softened by aloe vera, or maybe because of it, they tore into holes when used.

NOW WASH YOUR HANDS!

It would be 20 more years before toilet paper would be produced in perforated rolls and even then the quality of the paper, made from wood chips, was so poor that people often risked splinter in the bottom.  

We’ve come a long way to get to the ultra-soft stuff worth fighting for but stories have emerged recently that thanks to Covid-19,  many of us are still not on a roll but have been reduced to using cloths, newspaper and even junk mail.  Best thing for it.