Toilets of Rhodesia and other Number Twos of Notice. Part Two

Before I continue down the sewerage lane, I would like to bring to your attention this nifty little device. The idea is that you put into this machine all dodgy office documents and they get converted into toilet paper. This amazing machine costs a mere £63k and can be installed in any government department that produce dossiers full of crap.

Now, the machine you see in the video is the Mark 2. The original model was installed in 2001 in 10 Downing Street, for the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, after former President Bush had ‘Buy one, Get one Free!’ put in the White House. However, they worked in reverse. Tony simply put crap filled toilet paper into one end and Hey Presto! - out came manuscripts claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which we now know was a load of bullshit, mostly Tony’s.

Amazingly (this is true), in Rhodesia in the late ‘70s, the government also had a machine making toilet paper from scraps. The problem was, no one was really sure what kind of scraps were put into it - as what came out, and then distributed to every school in the country, might have sort of looked like a toilet roll, but the ‘paper’ couldn’t absorb any form of moisture.

As I have often pointed out in previous postings, the Rhodesians invented the craft of recycling. Our school exercise books were of such loose fibres that we could only write with ballpoint pens. If you used an Indian ink fountain pen, the paper sucked out every drop in seconds, turning the page into a soggy blue sheet. But, the toilet paper had a hi-gloss shiny side of exceptionally good writing quality and the reverse was matt and could handle a pencil very well. Unfortunately, it couldn’t wipe your recycling orifice clean; hence if we hadn’t brought any decent TP from home, we simply used our Afrikaans homework books.

I often wondered what happened to the warehouses full of these toilet rolls. The stuff was almost indestructible and even pulling any off the roll could give you a serious paper cut. I think they were eventually used to print Zimbabwe money.

To be continued…