Month: June 2023

I came across a story somewhere recently about a guy in England in the fourteenth century who was killed when he fell down the toilet.

Turns out the toilet was in a castle, three or four stories above ground, and was little more than a hole in the floor attached to a large drain that went all the way to the ground. The waste went down the chute and was collected at the bottom and taken away.

A plank of timber straddled the opening of the hole inside the castle and while the unfortunate guy was attending to business, the plank broke and he fell to his death. Now, when I first read that, I thought it was a bit far-fetched but then I remembered something.  

Many years ago, I spent some time travelling around eastern Europe with my Chernobyl buddies delivering humanitarian aid to various places in Belarus and Western Russia. One time we came across a picnic area at the edge of a forest and decided it was the perfect place for a rest and a cook up.

In amongst the trees, we spotted a wooden hut which had all the appearances of a toilet which made us very happy. Finding a functioning toilet in that part of the world in those days was tricky. A regular toilet bowl wasn’t always available either so you would often find just a hole in the floor. That’s why we celebrated whenever we were lucky enough to find a decent one.

In this case, our celebrations were a tad premature. I walked over to this shed and as I got closer, I could tell from the stench that I was not heading for a pleasant experience. It was dimly lit inside but I could see a square cut out of the timber floor and a deep pit beneath it. I didn’t need a manual to show me how to use this contraption.

One piece of advice we got very early on in our travels to those parts was to never go anywhere without a supply of toilet paper in your back pocket. I was grateful for that little nugget on more than one occasion.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see the ground moving beneath me and I assumed there was a little stream running below. When I looked closer, I could see it wasn’t water that was moving but the floor of the pit was covered with rats. Trying to concentrate of the task in hand suddenly became very difficult. Falling into that mess could have ended as badly as it did for our friend in the 14^th century.

According to allthatsinteresting.com, toileting in medieval times wasn’t such a pleasant experience either unless you were lucky enough to live in a castle and even then, toilets were just openings that led into a latrine or the castle moat.

The waste shafts of some medieval toilets ran down the exterior wall of a fort into moats or rivers, while others were designed with internal channels that funnelled waste into a courtyard or cesspit.

Others protruded out from the castle walls with openings that hung in the open-air, allowing gravity to do the rest. Usually, a wooden bench separated the stone-carved hole from a user’s rear and while sitting there they also had to be alert for the enemy who could try to sneak through the hole in the privy chamber.

That was almost impossible when castle toilets were built to hang out over a steep cliff. That also made disposal of the waste much easier when it fell directly into the ocean where no one had to deal with it.

For the common people, things were more complicated. It was forbidden to go in public spaces and dangerous too. In 1339, a beggar was killed by a cart in London while squatting to relieve himself in the street.

Houses with privies were rare so it was common for families to use chamber pots or buckets to relieve themselves at home and empty them into pits afterwards. With such a lack of facilities for dealing with sewage, the smell was everywhere.

Public latrines were scarce and served more than one customer at a time. They were often built over bridges and on quays to facilitate the evacuation of human waste directly into water. In medieval public lavatories, people sat next to each other to do their business and one London latrine had no less than two rows of 64 seats each.

Royal toileting was better. A man was specifically employed to wipe the king’s behind, and he was known as the “Groom of the King’s Close Stool”. His job was to carry around the portable toilet and clean the royal rear.

We’ve cleaned up our act a lot since then, or have we? Medieval toilet paper consisted of a fistful of hay. This was rarely an issue when it came to clogging or cleanliness even though it did go on fire occasionally, but it seems it was less hazardous than our modern toilet paper.

Toxic ‘forever chemicals’ have recently been found in toilet paper around the world. Research found this paper flushed down toilets and sent to sewage plants is probably a significant source of water pollution. Might be time to bring back the hay.

Closer to home, Cork City councillors have called for City Hall to better advertise the locations of their public toilets, after it emerged that a clean, supervised loo had opened its doors next to the city library and they didn’t know about it. Several city councillors said they didn’t even realise it was there.

Maybe they should count themselves lucky. There was a time when the smell would have left them in no doubt where the nearest toilet was.

Back in the early seventies as a teenager, I was a member of Mount Crozier Tennis Club in Cobh. It was a small club with three courts, but a large group of us spent most of our time there during the summer holidays. When we weren’t playing tennis, we were hanging out together and having fun.

It was a place where teenage love blossomed, and hearts were broken but at the end of the day it was the friendships that mattered. There was never an ounce of trouble in that place.

It was long before mobile phones, but we had no need to be calling anyone. When we wanted to meet up with friends, we just headed to Mt. Crozier, and you could be guaranteed someone would be there. There were no bags of cans or drugs to be found. The only vice belonged to the few who smoked cigarettes. Looking back on it, it was innocent fun.

One summer, a group of us decided to do a fund raiser for the club. It was going to be an open day. I can’t remember what we were going to offer in the line of entertainment, but I do remember some genius suggested that we should engage a fortune teller for the craic. I’m not sure how it happened exactly but I became the mystic for the day.

I have no idea why I went along with it, but I ended up wearing some ridiculous clothes, including a head scarf which was wrapped around me like a veil and some makeup. A cross between Hilda Ogden and Dame Edna Everage.

The readings took place in a small changing room in the clubhouse that was in darkness to protect the anonymity of the mystic. I can still hear some of the gang sniggering as they huddled outside the little window trying to hear my prophesies.

It was meant to be a bit of fun for the kids, and all went well until an elderly lady wandered in and wanted her future told. This was a real person not a child. Panic set in.

I waffled on for a bit, and I thought I was doing OK until I mentioned something about her husband. When she told me her husband was dead, I knew I was in bother. I don’t remember much after that apart from being consumed with guilt and resigning my position as the resident mystic with immediate effect.

I’m sure that woman wasn’t as old as she appeared to my teenage mind, and maybe she was having a joke at my expense too. She probably got a bigger laugh from the experience than we did. At any rate, I’m glad that finished my experiment with mysticism because it could have landed me in hot water with The Vatican if I was still practising.

According to The Times UK, The Vatican has launched a task force to tackle the rising number of mystics who claim to communicate with the Virgin Mary, including a woman with hundreds of followers near Rome who says her statue of the saint can multiply plates of pizza.

Claiming that it wanted to help believers who “can easily be fooled”, the Vatican said thousands of people had claimed to have “a private relationship with the Madonna” in Italy in recent decades, while only a handful were recognised as genuine by the church.

They claimed the rising army of Madonna mystics needed to be challenged because they “cause confusion, promote apocalyptic scenarios and even make accusations against the Pope and the church”.

They began their initiative on the day that Gisella Cardia, 53, went into her monthly trance on a hilltop at Trevignano near Rome, in front of a statue of the Madonna that she claims sheds tears of blood.

Watched by about 250 devotees, she jotted down advice and predictions the Madonna supposedly passed to her during her trance, before reading them out. Cardia, who neglected to mention that she has a conviction for fraudulent bankruptcy in her native Sicily, boasted she witnessed the inexplicable multiplication of pizza and gnocchi portions prepared for her followers.

Cardia has been ordered by the mayor to remove benches, a marquee and the statue of the Madonna, which were set up without permission. It has become a pilgrimage hub since six children said they saw visions of Mary in 1981. The Vatican is determined to avoid Catholicism being hijacked by possible fraudsters.

So, maybe all isn’t what it appears to be in the mystic world. Many people have faith in fortune tellers and astrology and some like to read their horoscopes, but others would say it’s just a load of hocus pocus.

It’s big business in America though. Four in 10 U.S. adults believe in psychics, according to polling by the Pew Research Center and there are nearly 94,000 psychic businesses nationwide with an estimated revenue of $2 billion a year. 

To each his own I say but Steve Finan who previously wrote horoscopes for a newspaper, has poured cold water on the predictions. Writing in The Courier he said, “Don’t believe your horoscope – I’ve written enough of them to know it’s all nonsense.”

He says those horoscopes we see every day are fun, but fake, and his advice is to have a giggle but don’t make any life-changing decisions on the back of them. Predictions for the next 12 months based on the alignment of the stars are a load of rubbish according to Mr. Finan.

It is a pseudoscience he says. Newspapers print horoscopes every day, and there is little wrong with that. It’s a bit of fun, something to have a laugh with during your coffee break and shouldn’t be taken seriously. As someone with experience of the mystic world, I second that.

I don’t snore, at least I don’t think I do. Having said that, 60 per cent of people who do snore, refuse to accept they have a problem, so maybe I’m one of those. I have received an occasional poke in the ribs from my wife after a night in my local tavern, but those visits are rare now.

So, I will rephrase that and say I don’t snore much. I have woken myself from a light doze a few times with a snort and maybe that counts. If I was a regular snorer though, I imagine my wife would be complaining more about it, but she isn’t. She is a deep sleeper herself however so maybe she just isn’t aware of it.

There are different levels of snoring. There is a gentle whimper you’d hardly even recognise as a snore and a noisier version that is fairly harmless but could disturb you if you were in close proximity. Then there is the executive model. A noise of such magnitude it could be used to warn ships of impending danger and I experienced one of those.

Many years ago, I was part of a humanitarian aid convoy delivering medical supplies to orphanages, hospitals, day care centres etc in Belarus in the aftermath of the nuclear accident at the power plant in Chernobyl. The days were long and tiring and there was lots of driving involved. Unloading the trucks by hand was hard going too so by nightfall, we were ready for sleep.

We usually spent the night in our vehicles, but we were sometimes offered a bit of floor space indoors when it was available and occasionally, we got the comfort of a bed. It was on one of these occasions that I encountered the king of all snorers.

There were about twenty of us sleeping in small single beds in a large dormitory-type room. At some point, I woke up to a terrible racket. To say this guy was snoring doesn’t do justice to the sound coming out of his body. It was hard to believe a human could even produce such a din and live through it.

The room was dimly lit but there was some light filtering through the windows, and I could see others in the room also sitting up trying to identify the source of the noise. It wasn’t hard to find him. Various missiles were sent flying in his direction, but it didn’t quieten him. Eventually it became too much for a group of truck drivers who surrounded his bed, grabbed hold of his mattress and carried him outside. They placed him on the grass under one of the trucks and left him there.

Peace was restored once more but this guy was so loud, we could still hear him snoring in the distance. It was funny at the time, and it took us a while to get back to sleep we were laughing so much but there is a serious side to snoring. It can cause problems in relationships and can also be a threat to health of the snorer. So, what causes it.

It happens when the walls of the throat relax and narrow as we sleep, partially blocking the upper airway. The snoring sound is caused by vibrations of the tongue, nose and throat. This helps to explain why men snore more often and more loudly than women: men tend to have larger airways, into which their tongues fall back when they sleep, plus a higher proportion of fat in the upper part of the tongue.

According to the Times UK, new research has found that those who snore may be at risk of harming their bodies and brains. The good news is that lifestyle changes and medical advances can help to alleviate the problem. Light snoring or occasional nocturnal snorts are harmless, but at the other end of the spectrum, when snoring is sufficiently ground shaking to be called obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), it could be a threat to your physical and cognitive health.

If that’s not bad enough, The Irish Examiner had more worrying news and reported that people who experience sleep problems are more likely to have a stroke. Getting too much or too little sleep, taking long naps, snoring, snorting, and sleep apnoea are associated with an increased risk of stroke, a global study co-led by the University of Galway has found.

People who sleep for too many or too few hours are more likely to have a stroke than people who sleep an average number of hours. They also found snorers are almost twice as likely as non-snorers to have a stroke and that’s not all.

Many couples sleep in separate rooms because of snoring and in some cases, head for the divorce court. Understandable I suppose. We all get cranky when we don’t get enough sleep and when that’s happening on a regular basis it wouldn’t be long wearing you down. It’s easy to see how tensions might rise and create difficulties in the best of relationships. It’s not all bad news though.

A Cardiff woman woke in the early hours from her husband’s ‘snoring’. Her annoyance turned to panic when she could not rouse 39-year-old who was a fit and active cycling enthusiast. It turned out he was in cardiac arrest, and she thought her husband had died.

She called the Welsh Ambulance Service who instructed her how to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), which she did for eight minutes until the ambulance arrived. The ambulance crew shocked the patient with a defibrillator fifteen times to restart his heart. He survived but spent a month in hospital before being discharged.

So, the next time to get the urge to knee your snoring partner in the back, check his pulse first.

Protest marches and demonstrations have always been with us. There are times, when people feel sufficiently aggrieved, they need to take to the streets to let off some steam. That’s fair enough and everyone has the right to take part in a lawful protest.

I was involved in policing a few of these during my service in An Garda Siochana and most of them went off without a hitch because there was usually engagement with the organisers beforehand. It suited both sides to ensure demonstrations were well marshalled, trouble free and caused as little disruption to the general public as possible.

The one notable exception was the march to the British Embassy in Dublin in 1981 in support of the H-Block hunger strikers which turned into a riot. The violence that erupted that day resulted in over 200 people being injured, hundreds of thousands of Euros worth of damage caused and dozens of arrests but that was an exceptional event.

The French might be a bit extreme when it comes to demonstrating but, in the UK, where they are normally more sedate, public expressions of anger have taken another twist in recent years.

Protestors are using more disruptive actions like gluing themselves to motorways to cause maximum inconvenience to commuters. Or sticking their hands to fixed objects, chaining themselves to goal posts and tennis nets and defacing works of art to gain attention.

Just Stop Oil protesters threw orange paint over a garden display at the Chelsea Flower Show in London recently and in Sheffield during the World Snooker Championships protestors from the same group threw orange paint over a snooker table, disrupting the days play.

This kind of destructive nonsense isn’t confined to the UK and if the authorities here don’t take action, we could see a lot more of it in this jurisdiction, particularly when it comes to immigration issues.

I saw a video on social media of a truck attempting to deliver furniture to an asylum centre in Santry in Dublin. There was a barrier at the entrance to the facility and a few men were sitting on chairs next to it, blocking the entrance.

They refused to allow the lorry to travel beyond the barrier, so the delivery guys had to offload the goods outside on the roadway and carry them into the property while two gardai looked on.

I don’t blame the two gardai for not getting involved. They were acting on instructions from their superiors who were presumably taking orders from Garda Headquarters, but the optics weren’t great. Gardaí have so far relied on a soft approach when dealing antimigrant protests, but it’s time to up the ante.

No vigilante group should be allowed to assume the authority to block a public road and deny access to members of the public. In this case, workers were prevented from carrying out a delivery on behalf of their employer and as a consequence, their job was made more difficult.

There was a similar incident in Clare when demonstrators again blocked access to a public roadway. In some cases, they wore balaclavas and checked identification and questioned drivers as to where they were going and what their business was.

This kind of activity seems to be growing in popularity and the activists justify their behaviour by claiming the right to protest peacefully. There is a big difference though between having a peaceful protest and engaging in behaviour involving violence and intimidation.

In Dublin, asylum seekers were intimidated out of a makeshift street camp before it was set on fire. The following day a mob descended on a nearby asylum-seeker camp and damaged and kicked at tents and hurled abuse at the people living in them.

We have all seen videos of gardai being shouted at, cursed, provoked and abused by protesters and there is a certain cohort, particularly the far-right activists, who push this to the limit. They wrap the Irish tricolour around their shoulders like a Superman cape, arm themselves with a camera phone and proudly claim to be the defenders of the Nation.

They believe they have a large following, but I seriously doubt that. They certainly don’t represent me or, I suspect, the vast majority of fair-minded people, so, why are they getting away with it?

Garda management seem to think that by enforcing the Public Order Act they will play into the hands of the far-right. But surely by giving them a free hand to cause a public nuisance, this is exactly what they’re doing, and offenders are becoming more emboldened by the lack of a lawful response.

The Policing Authority has “totally condemned” the escalation of protests from lawful demonstrations to “violence and intimidation” of vulnerable people, communities and gardaí and has sought to discuss the worsening situation with Garda Commissioner Drew Harris and his senior team.

The general secretary of the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors, Antoinette Cunningham, has called for “proper training” and resourcing to deal with the protests. They also want to meet with the Garda Commissioner as a matter of urgency.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said protests outside of premises earmarked to accommodate refugees is “wrong” and go against “our culture and understanding of being Irish people.”

Justice Minister Simon Harris told the Dáil he has been in contact with Garda Commissioner Harris who said gardaí are mindful of its response to the threat posed by the far right and said, “we should not overstate it but we cannot and should not tolerate it.”

Everyone appears to be in agreement that this type of behaviour is unacceptable so what are we waiting for? The Public Order Act is there for a reason. Take these offenders off the streets and into the court rooms and let justice take its course. Enough is enough.