VERY IMPORTANT PROBLEM!
‘Environment Agency figures earlier this year showed there were a total of 301,091 sewage spills [in England] in 2022, an average of 824 a day.’ THE GUARDIAN, May 2023
‘VERY IMPORTANT PROBLEM! is written in large,
black capital letters, at a slight angle,
with a marker pen, in the toilette
of an otherwise sophisticated
café – with organic credentials –
on the busy road from Iraklion
to Archanes, opposite the entrance
to Arthur Evans’ Villa Ariadne,
a short walk from the Knossos heritage site.
The ‘problem’ is toilet paper in the
toilet bowl, a generally
unbruited facet of modern Attic life.
Not much further on from Knossos the road
crosses the Archanes Gorge, which is spanned
by a now defunct aqueduct, built
by one group of imperialist invaders,
and later its flow enhanced by another.
It brought enough water from Mount Juktas
to the centre of Candia – now
Iraklion – for the daily needs,
including fountains, of a burgeoning
population of colonisers, first
the Venetians then the Ottomans.
Until recently, the site was visited
only by historians of hydraulic engineering,
and an old poet and his family.
Though there are myths and hypotheses,
we know factually very little about
the civilisation that built Knossos –
whose environs, at its zenith, housed
eighteen thousand people – including,
of course, what they wiped their bottoms with.
But we do know they had flush toilets,
clean water supply lines, and a system
of drainage that properly separated
rain water from sewage.
John Chapman
August 24, 2023But still, over 160 million people in India have no clean drinking water nor do they have proper sewage disposal, yet India sends rockets to the moon.
Alex Cox
August 25, 2023Maybe the ancients had flush toilets, but I bet the didn’t have toilet paper! TP is, based on my limited experience, a big menace in Latin America, where the sewers/drains aren’t built to accommodate it.
In Japan they have toilets which, pardon my explicitude, rinse your bum. I highly recommend the concept, and thank you for crafting a poem about this issue.