Being the water wise people we are, we have a bucket in our shower to collect water for the garden. I’m not sure how our plants feel about being hydrated with our icky bodily run-off, but they’re not really in a pos­ition to make demands. (After all, when a drought’s on, bou­gain­vil­laeas can’t be choosers.)

Ours isn’t a huge shower, but I’m fine with the bucket being there, as long as it’s in the corner to the front of me and to the right; that is; opposite the door, and at the fur­thest dis­tance from the taps and showerhead.

It seems, however, that every time I step into the shower (usually daily, I’m quite the met­ro­sexual), the pre­vious user of the shower (whom I shall here refer to as ‘the lady of the house’ or ‘m’lady’) has moved the bucket to a less favourable corner. That is to say, the corner opposite the door, but closest to the taps and showerhead.

This I find vexing, as it fre­quently results in brief but nev­er­theless undesirable contact between the rim of the bucket and my right calf. And so I move the bucket to my pre­ferred corner — and there it stays until the lady of the house comes to use the shower again.

On one such occasion I wondered if, despite my dis­quiet about m’lady’s pre­ferred pos­ition for the bucket, I should return the receptacle there once my showering is com­plete. But then I reasoned that if we both moved the bucket to our pre­ferred corner and left it there, we would be sharing the burden equally. If I alone moved the bucket back and forth each time, m’lady would never have to move it, and that’s clearly no way to achieve equality between the sexes.

This reminded me of a for­mu­lation I con­ceived many years ago con­cerning the most appro­priate default pos­ition (ver­tical or hori­zontal) for a toilet seat in a multisex share­house or office. (Just to clarify, I’m referring to a share­house or office in which there are members of both sexes, not one that plays host to a mul­titude of sex acts, necessarily.)

A fre­quent com­plaint about men is that they leave the toilet seat up. This is presented as no mere neg­li­gence on the man’s part, but as a delib­erate, cal­cu­lated act whose bar­baric intent can be equated with that of clubbing a seal or har­pooning a whale.

Let me suggest that if there are an equal number of men and women sharing a toilet (not sim­ul­tan­eously, just to be clear), and each person places the toilet seat either up or down according to pref­erence and need, then leaves the seat in that pos­ition upon the com­pletion of their trans­action, the burden between the sexes is equally shared, as in the shower and bucket example above.

If any­thing, the males in this equation come out second best, since a pro­portion of their toilet usage will, one hopes, require the seat to be down. It would be unusual for such a visitor to lift the seat again once full sat­is­faction has been achieved; therefore, assuming the next visitor is female, they will find to their delight that the seat is in the optimal (ie. hori­zontal) pos­ition and not in the hysteria-inducing ver­tical position.

My point, elab­or­ately made, is this. All other things (number of men using the toilet rel­ative to number of women, reg­u­larity of bladder and bowel emptying, attent­iveness to the pos­ition of the toilet seat and appro­priate dealing therewith, etc) being equal, for every instance of a toilet seat having to be lowered fol­lowing a pre­vious visitor’s upright urin­ation, there will be a slightly greater number of instances of a toilet seat having to be raised.

If any­thing, men should be com­plaining about the toilet seat being down all the time. After all, the con­sequences of acci­dentally sitting in a seatless toilet are mild embar­rassment and the pos­sib­ility of acquiring a chill (and perhaps some bruising) around the rump; the con­sequences of acci­dentally making use of a toilet from the upright pos­ition while the seat is down include, but are not limited to, getting piss everywhere.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to describe me, in my weaker moments, as having a passive aggressive tem­perament. It’s a maligned trait; people would much rather you be aggressive aggressive. That way you get everything out in the open. People may get maimed or killed, but at least everyone knows where they stand. (Or not, if there’s been maiming and killing.)

Aggressive aggression led to two world wars during the twen­tieth century, and countless other ter­rit­orial and reli­gious con­flicts throughout the ages. One wonders how the world might be dif­ferent if Hitler had merely stood at the border of the Sudatenland, glowering across Western Europe and wearing a ‘Fine, keep your lebensraum’ T-shirt.

However, there are times when I can see the unhealthy and unat­tractive side of passive aggression. One mani­fest­ation of it in par­ticular makes me pity and despise the passive aggressor. You may have encountered it yourself. It’s when someone in your work­place or share­house puts up one of those trite, sar­castic and judg­mental notices con­cerning the kitchen fairy (more spe­cifically, the non-employment thereof on the premises).

I’ve seen numerous examples of the kitchen fairy notice, most recently a version in the form of a job advert­isement. I can only presume that a simple ‘Please clean your dishes’ notice would fail to a) achieve the desired outcome, b) fill the author with the requisite degree of self-righteousness or c) deliver quite the same Martin-Luther-nailing-his-95-Theses-to-the-Wittenburg-church-door feeling.

When you work in pub­lishing, you live in a state of con­stant anxiety that you might be responsible for letting a really nasty typo into the wild. I used to proofread tele­phone dir­ect­ories (oh the glamour) and can still recall the cold, knifing fear that ran through me when it appeared that we’d included the wrong mobile phone number in a paid advert­isement for an erotic masseur. The masseur was OK about it, but the owner of the mobile phone, who was not an erotic masseur and had no interest in changing careers in that dir­ection, threatened to sue.

Fortunately, the error was not mine, and I was able to obtain not only the correct phone number but also, sub­sequently and con­sequently, the pleasures of a highly relaxing massage.

I doubt the same soothing min­is­tra­tions were available to English printer Robert Barker when he left out a fairly crucial appearance of the word ‘not’ in the 1631 edition of the King James Bible. Crucial because the ‘not’ was part of the Seventh Commandment in Exodus 20:14, which nor­mally reads ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ — but in Barker’s edition became a com­mandment of a much more lib­er­ating nature.

Barker’s bible became known as the ‘Wicked Bible’. (Wicked as in dev­ilish, not as in ‘Gnarly dude, thanks for the God-sanctioned sex-action’.) Barker wasn’t sued, but he was fined — some­thing like £300, which pretty much des­troyed him.

He did, however, manage to squeeze in several weeks of Bible-approved for­nicatin’ before a replacement edition was printed.

I was walking down my street this morning when I heard a tune both mournful and carnivalesque.

Around the corner walked a crusty, withered old rake playing some sort of sea shanty on a mouth organ. He wore a dark navy overcoat and tugged upon his grubby sailor’s cap as we bade each other good morning.

I thought how splendid it was that he was providing his own enter­tainment. I thought, “Wow, that’s so much better than car­rying an iPod around”.

Then I thought, “Wait a minute, you can’t listen to a podcast com­mentary of last night’s episode of Doctor Who on a mouth organ.”