LIVING STANDARDS 31/12/2012

The year has ended and multitudes are changing themselves into better definitions of self. You need to use the toilet for first time in two thousand and thirteen and this feels like a momentous time to enjoy and to be remembered.

It is a new bathroom that your friends have designed with a lot of effort and love. You get on with the business of defecation as usual, not without some degree of aprehension, considering the abject diet that you follow.

The surprise is, for once, not related to the consitency, shape, colour, odour, or the organoleptic qualities of your capricious creation. No, this time you feel like wearing somebody else's clothes: there is a distance between toilet seats and the surrounding floor that happens to be identical in the UK, Albania and Ulan Bator, but not this time, you are sure of that.

How to get up every morning in the same bed of yesterday, next to a familiar body, hearing the radio show, the specific noises outside and inside, reproducing carefully studied movements in front of the mirror, your dog, your boss, your croissant, and, at the same time, having actually loved, laughed, listened, cut your chin, hug, spit and been transported to where croissants go when they die.

That's why, when life misses a beat, one has to pay attention. It is a gift, unexpected and free. It fills you with Life.

Sitting on the toilet a little too far from the floor was an exhilarating experience. How can we all use the same (international) standard dimensions on chairs, desks, stairs, the bar height, when my stature (both physical and moral) is so much shorter than other human dimensions in different populations? We live a pret-a-porter existence.

A friend of mine from Logrono, in Spain, told me many years ago (too many for standardisation purposes) that he could not sell windows in France because window holes, door holes and other human practices involving holes had very different standards in Spain and France. (I beg you to consider the implications of growing up in a dictatorship).

What a beautiful profession: window seller. Its substance is Aristotelian  but its essence is Platonic. Window seller!, even better, window maker!!! That is pure and poetic, that is an honourable job that your daughters will love you for. Yes, I am talking to you, amigo mio, send me an email now.

Still, I cannot work out why it is that both the German and the English need their toilet paper at least 20% wider than the Spanish roll.