Being Blown In A Toilet

Blocked Toilet

Toilet Block

Churnet Valley, Staffordshire, England

Climbs 6 – Rocktype Sandstone (hard) – Altitude 154m a.s.l – Faces SW

Crag features
 This bouldering block is high on the hillside with two pine trees on top. Most of the starts are sitting starts, as the Toilet Block is only 5 meters high… and after all, toilets are synonymous with sitting down. Toilets are also synonymous with blocking, so enjoy the Toilet Block. 

Climbs on The Toilet Block

1 Bog Trot V2

Start on the front face then swing left around arête

to gain the jugs up and left.

2 Touching Cloth V3

Sit start, gain the top directly. Then, with a deep

breath, mantle it out.

3 Follow Through V1

Gain the top of block with the use of the lovely jugs

and then roll on to the top. Going right is V2.

4 Toilet Duck V5

Start on the jugs on the right, gain a good pocket on

the front face. Move left and fight your way to the

top.

5 Toilet Traverse V1

Traverse the chest height line of holds, same grade

either way.

The small perched block with a vein running from the top immediately

left contains:

6 Double Trouble V3

From sitting, gain the vein and follow to top out.

Access notes

From the cafe, take a right as you go up the path towards Cottage Rocks (home of a very good route called Cottaging). To get to it go up path as for cottage and kind of double back on yourself where there's less vegetation.

Toilet Vision

The drawings shown on the last two blogs were made in 1982. So imagine my surprise and delight when, whilst exploring the Churnet valley a month or so ago, I come across The Toilet Block – a toilet you can climb onto. Toilet vision, I’ve got toilet vision.

Tiny Toilet Mouthpiece

I’d planned to make a miniature toilet (it was before I’d heard of Duchamp); a toilet designed for lips rather than buttocks: a toilet mouthpiece; a toilet you could blow into with blown-out cheeks. In other words, a toilet like all other toilets, if you swapped buttocks for lips. Cracks are usually pressed onto toilets, but I’d planned to insert my miniature toilet-mouthpiece, sideways, into a crack in a rocky outcrop. Blown into, the toilet would inflate the small outcrop - blow it up - into a big crag, a cliff, even.

Sir Cliff once played Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights. Here’s Cliff - Caspar David Friedrich style – on top of a cliff. But is it true, that Cliff has no need for even the tiniest of toilets? Does Cliff really wear a bag? 

Outside Toilet

A drawing from 1982: I think it was a plan for a photo; it was inspired by a dumped toilet I’d come across beneath a rocky outcrop. The photograph was going to be called Outcrap. I had the title but never took the picture… it’s just as well really.

Why Not Make Toilet Downpipes Out Of Clear Plastic?

Why not make toilet downpipes out of clear plastic?

Thus the colon less spastic.

I said to the Dyno-rod man,

Swallowing lunch, in his van.

You could spot the blockage straight away,

See how far down the side of the house it’s got,

No call-out fee to pay,

Act accordingly whilst it’s still hot.

He said, that’s manor from heaven for guttersnipes,

You’ll soon attract slime.

Cleanse your system of clear-downpipes,

Stop courting crime.

Burglars, they’ll sit outside your house,

Watch your downpipe from the comfort of their Capri,

Where any darkening of the clear plastic

Will be crystal for them to see.

Say the pipe’s been vacant for a day or two.

They’d break in and burgle you.

Shit on your bed, instead of the loo.

Drawing On A Dirty Habit

In the days before I could afford cigars, I made a couple of drawings, showing how cigarettes could be converted into cheroots. All you have to do is attach a cigarette to the pannier rack at the back of your bike (the bike has to be sans mudguards), then ride along a muddy track. It’s purely cosmetic of course, but so are mudpack facepacks. They advertise a mudpack-therapy for scars, so why not a mud-packed luggage-rack treatment to tan cigarettes into cigars? The cigarettes could be batch converted on the rack at the back of the bike – similar to the way you grill sausages on a barbeque, or toast bread under the grill – and like the sausages, you have to turn the cigarettes every so often to get them an even brown. And everybody knows smoking is a dirty habit.

Subliminal Graffiti

The Sting (twice bitten)

I used to go climbing on an old ruin in Cannizaro Park, near to where I lived in London. I’d walk there once a week and my route took me past some allotments. One time, just as I’m passing the allotments, I hear a woman’s screaming. I look through a hole in the fence to see a woman - a redhead with long hair - alone in the middle of a vegetable patch, pulling her hair and shaking her head like mad.Then alone amongst the greens, the redhead stops pulling her hair and starts slapping her head. I deduce she has a bee her hair. I continue on my route.

Now here’s the sting. The following week – at about the same time of day – just as I’m passing the allotment, the same thing happened all over again: same redhead, same screaming, same hair-pulling followed by the now familiar head-slapping routine. For all I knew it might have even been the same bee.

Carry-on Hand Luggage