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When we were prepping for COVID

Remember the madness?


When I was a kid I had a book called Dinkum Dunnies. It featured photographs of a whole mad, crazy variety of different outdoor toilets you would have to see to believe. It effused the ocker Aussie spirit of humorous obscenity.


But that sense of humour has taken on a very embarrassing note of seriousness. No longer is it funny that we are as a nation are so obsessed with our other end and all its hygiene risks. It is now serious business as so many of us have taken to our local supermarkets to take what is our national birthright in the form of mountains of toilet paper.


We have our bottoms to think of now that a respiratory virus is taking hold. And nothing will stand between us and a Great Dividing Range of soft 3 ply to rely on when things get serious.


But here am I thinking of my in-laws in a northern provincial village in the Philippines who honestly never bother with toilet paper. All those times I shook hands with and interacted with them personally, and never once got sick. It was only after we left that my wife told me they just use their hands and wash thoroughly.


Oh joy.When I was a kid I had a book called Dinkum Dunnies. It featured photographs of a whole mad, crazy variety of different outdoor toilets you would have to see to believe. It effused the ocker Aussie spirit of humorous obscenity.


But that sense of humour has taken on a very embarrassing note of seriousness. No longer is it funny that we are as a nation are so obsessed with our other end and all its hygiene risks. It is now serious business as so many of us have taken to our local supermarkets to take what is our national birthright in the form of mountains of toilet paper.


We have our bottoms to think of now that a respiratory virus is taking hold. And nothing will stand between us and a Great Dividing Range of soft 3 ply to rely on when things get serious.


But here am I thinking of my in-laws in a northern provincial village in the Philippines who honestly never bother with toilet paper. All those times I shook hands with and interacted with them personally, and never once got sick. It was only after we left that my wife told me they just use their hands and wash thoroughly.


Oh joy.



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