Toilet talk

Brendan O’Neill discovers that public lavatories are plastered with government propaganda, much of it telling us how disgusting we are

Under the Blair terror, you can’t even take a piss in peace. The other day, standing at a urinal in a plush cinema in north London, I found myself staring at a notice on the wall in front of me. ‘Relax, go ahead and read’, it said. ‘No one knows you’re a wife-beater. You don’t look like someone who would hit a woman.’ The ad further advised that I should not flee the setting in which I had apparently been battering my partner, because ‘we will track you down’ and ‘punish you’. I was so angry I almost spilled. The old geezer standing next to me was reading the same threatening words above his urinal: he was 80 if he was a day and, bless him, was wearing a suit and tie (and probably a pocket watch) to the flicks.