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Brussels - Back in the day in continental Europe, there was a job you dared not touch with a longstick. That job, with the unsexy title of night soilman, was left for drunks and never-do-wells who hadn't figured out what to do with themselves in life. You see, even after the Romans built a wonderful sewerage system that still stands today, these proud Anglo-Saxons just couldn't come round to using it.
So they continued taking a crap in an open pot and hiring the night soilman to carry it away and dispose of it wherever he saw fit -- which was usually the next alley behind your house.
Forget the public Roman baths and spas. Continental Europeans (and you may laugh now) are just about as new to the toilet as we are, only accepting it fully in the last one hundred years.
Which probably explains why a lot of chicanery goes on in the public conveniences about here. Back in Uganda, getting into a public toilet is a one-two-three go experience. Two minutes to do your business and you dare not even breathe in there. Here? It's the time to get kinky and dirty. And nothing illustrates this better than the toilet grafitti.
The doors are usually a metre away from the pot where you do your business but that hasn't stopped the grafitti artistes from writing on them.
One common theme seems to run through all of them. These are very very angry and bitter men. Well, sometimes they are also gay and very horny. On the wall to the public convenience in the library, for instance, one fellah who got spiritual while doing the dirty wrote "Jesus loves you. He died for your sins." Nice try.
Just below him is another fellah who cared nothing for Mary's boy and had a bone to pick with the Iraqis. So he wrote: "Fight the [Iraq] war, f*ck the norm."
This F-word business continues directly below with another angry user who rants: "F*ck Belgium (and I thought I was the only one with that dark thought). F*ck Europe. F*ck the world. F*ck people." Well another guy thinking about his last date with death muses philosophically: "sometimes it ain't easy to die. She didn't even kill me."
Well back to the horny gays. About here it isn't just fashionable to be gay, it's also something to bait people with.
That's how this classified ad ended up on the toilet door: "If you are homosexual and you have a beautiful girlfriend, I can f*ck you, provided you let me [sleep] with your girlfriend. Leave e-mail. P.S I am 1m 87, penis 16cm. I am not a nigger nor a f*cking Albanian."
It probably didn't take very long for another fellah to answer the ad, because just below is this script: "I am a homosexual and I have a beautiful girlfriend but you can't f*ck neither of us because only a guy who has a really small penis would write this bullsh*t.
It really sucks to have a small dick, doesn't it, you poor heterosexual idiot." [emphasis not mine]. You would think people would stop at the sex wars and insulting each other, but no sir. The ads keep coming and this guy definitely hadn't had any for a long time. His solution? Advertise in the loo. So he wrote: "I need a f*ck. Free girls everyday. Call me please." For good measure he drew a heart, but forgot one important detail. There was no phone number to call him on.
Not so this fella. Feeling the urges of nature taking over, he wrote: "You wanna suck? Service de baser." I dare not translate the French, but this fella left a number. It's 0494 143237. It seems like a genuine number and if you've got the guts, just put a 32 in front of it and find out what type of cojones this guy has got.
It would be kind to suggest that most of the people who get into these conveniences and get literary urges are fairly drunk and there is evidence. Like writing on the wall that says: "Drink Vodka. Everyday." But that can't be the whole story. The famous French mathematician Rene Descartes may have declared a universal truth when he said "I think therefore I am" but some guy here would have none of it. So he crossed it out the word 'think' and wrote: "I hurt therefore I am." Hardly a drunk fellow.
When the lads are not getting terribly xenophobic, they are ranting about the boys in red (Man U, silly). One fellah must have been so peeved after the Red Devils took the premiership crown last year that he wrote: "Who the f*ck is Man U?" To be honest, they were last year's English premiership champions, winning this trophy for the 8th time in 11 years, but how did that escape this fella?
Anyway, a sober voice intervenes in pencil nearby asking: "How can you love/hate a team? Do you guys have no lives?"
But a despondent writer in this rest room seems to sum up the bile boiling in men's breasts here. Referring to recent events in the Middle East, he makes this doomsday call. "[President George] Bush rules the world and that is very good. And he will soon be ruling hell too along with Saddam [Hussein], Osama bin Laden and all the other ass holes that destroy the world day by day. Wake up."
Now when did the men's room move from being a mere convenience to a political arena full of zealots, homophobes and perverts? Huh? | 
