The trouble with public toilets is they’re a little bit too public, by which I mean they’ll let anyone in.
If the kids need to pee I always look for those unisex or handicapped toilets. It’s not that I want to be there for the action, but you just never know what they’ll come across in there without you.
Take my friend, Goliath*, for example.
At his wife’s insistence he took the damn kids off her damn hands for a couple of damn hours so she could clean the damn house. They went to the park, where it turned out he was destined to be damned either way.
“Dad,” said his eight year old daughter said within minutes of arriving. “Dad! I need to pee!”
But there was no unisex/handicap toilet at this park, so he was faced with a choice between taking everyone into the men’s toilet or standing outside the female toilet block, meaning he could still be close to his other two kids on the slide. He went for the later.
I mean, they were the only people at the park so what could go wrong?
“Dad?” his daughter said when she came outside again. She was frowning. She was thinking. She was looking for answers. Unfortunately, the question had the words cock, my and suck in it, only in reverse order. “What does that mean?”
“Wha-what?!” he stammered.
“Someone’s written it on the wall in the toilet. What does it mean?”
“It means,” he said, his brain trying to sort out which way to go with this and struggling badly, “that someone has been naughty.”
“You mean,” said his daughter, “because you’re not allowed to write on walls?”
“That’s right,” he said.
They’d begun to walk back to the swings where the other two kids were playing and Goliath thought the topic had been dropped.
Not yet.
“So what does what they wrote mean?” Miss8 again asked her dad.
“It means,” he said, rather brilliantly, “that someone can’t spell coke. Now, who wants a drink?!”
And, thinking he would stick with the busier parks with the better toilet blocks from now on, he marched his kids to the shop for a sugary, cold distraction.
*Not his real name. Thankfully.
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“Raising a family on little more than laughs”
