If there is one room in the house that causes more marital discourse than any other it is the toilet. The most common arguments are the lid up or down, the loo paper falling to the front or the back of the roll, reading the paper, basically taking too long when others are waiting, leaving skid marks on the bowl, leaving one square of paper or an empty roll and not leaving a spare handy for the next person.

In the scheme of life these are not fatal or alarming criminal offences but after an age of co-existence it can be a matter of life or death of a relationship, especially when you introduce children.

For the life of me I don’t know why it affects women more than men that when you go to the loo children follow you in, with the cats milling around your legs.

A business motivator said if you want to know more about a person you are going into business with then check out his car and his bathroom. 

On the one hand the car is the outer persona – what he shows to the world about who he is and what he is like. How he looks after his car and grooms it or trashes it says a lot for himself and how he will treat his business.  Think of the older man who buys a sports car or Harley – it’s known as men-o-porsche syndrome.

The bathroom is the inner sanctum – how he acts or behaves when no one is looking in behind the scenes. A tidy clean bathroom will say more about whether they will be a better business partner when it comes to dealing with crap, than what he can act to your face.

The announcement of a new toilet block in the Punanga Nui Market is a welcome addition given the state of these rooms over the past years. 

If the state of a bathroom shows the inner character of a person or community, we have been sadly lacking and unbelievably publicly embarrassing ourselves in the face of visitors for quite some time.