Wednesday 8 October 2014

199. Porta-No-Way

24th August 2014, Notting Hill Carnival, Notting Hill, London

Some people have put it down to me being bit of a princess.

They may have a point, but no matter how you twist and turn it, the very idea of a toilet that is portable and non flushing and has no hand soap or L'Occitane moisturizer is just plain wrong.

And due to my refusal to ever use a portaloo I have never attended festivals or any other outdoors activity requiring the occasional bathroom break without proper facilities. There was even a summer when I, aged 14, refused the beach for six weeks whilst the changing rooms were being refurbished and portaloos were put out in their place.

Eventually I might want to go to Glastonbury though. Like when Dave Grohl is there next. And by then I need to have prepared myself for all the circumstances that might crop up at a festival. Apart from the tent sleeping. A girl has got to draw the line somewhere.

After queuing up to pay money to go pee at someone's house and not being able to face the queue, we had to resort to the portaloos. I would have happily postponed my portaloo experience for another 10 years - and for good reason as it turns out.

In the queue with Crazy Canadian, I already start to panic. Like hyper ventilating, cleaning invisible germs away from my hands with invisible antibacterial wipes and loudly exclaiming every 30 seconds or so exactly how incredibly vile I am finding the whole concept. But I am ready. But only after tying my hair back, clinging on to any piece of clothing that may end up touching the walls otherwise and handing my Marc Jacobs bag over to Hell's Bells to look after whilst I was gone. I may have said a rather intense, dramatic and heart felt goodbye to the bag. It may have embarrassed the people around me.

Once inside this disgusting box of dread, I actually want to get physically sick. The smell, the confined space, the general lack of... clean. And where the eff is my L'Occitane?!?!

I wish I could say I got over it.

Instead I run out of that god awful invention as soon as it was humanly possible, desperately trying to get my hands on some hand sanitizer to rub exactly everywhere including my hair, but for the first time in the history of our friendship, Hell's Bells was not carrying her trusted tube of alcogel. It was actually worse of a betrayal than if she had sold my Marc Jacob's bag to the enemy for chocolate.

In the end I resorted to scrub my hands with vodka. Well worth the 10 pounds.

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