Please flush the toliet, a photo by elleonheels on Flickr.

Taking my three year old to town is never an easy exercise these days, especially with a six month (teething and therefore grumpy) baby in tow and an exceptionally weak bladder (hers not mine – however after two babies, mine could be better)

Every second shop you could guarantee the cry “Mummy, I need the toliet….NOW!” And the mad panic sets in as you try and work out exactly where the nearest toliets are and whether you can make it in time without having soiled knickers again (I carry so many spare pairs now, they are lietrally coming out of my ears)

And so onto the delights that are public toliets and it doesn’t matter where you are. You could be in the poshest b****y dpeartment store in town, and still the toliets wil be the foulest most repungest things you will ever enter.

What happens to perfectly dignifined and hygienic women when they leave their spotless houses? Do they just decide that it might be fun to leave a nice streak down the cistern? Or even better stuff the bowl full of paper, so much so that it cannot flush. Failing that do they think it might be amusing, hysterical even to leave their old tampon on the floor for a three year old to point at and ask what it is.

Every toliet I walked into had something wrong with it. And in the end I had to settle for the lesser stained option. My daughter glanced into the bowl and stated it was “all dirty” – she ended up with stage fright and couldn’t go.

Of course the result was her wetting her knickers in Past Times while I was trying to desperatly find Mother’s Day gifts (really, what do you get a woman who says she really, REALLY doesn’t want anything?). The foul lady in the shop was obviously not too impressed by my urine-stained girl and I almost felt like frog-marching into the loos we had just been in and saying “really – can you blame her?”

Thank god my baby is a boy, at least he will have the enviable advantage of being able to go up a tree if required (or that b****y foul lady’s leg).