Flush Brexit

I listened to a retrospective on Izal Toilet paper the other day on The BBC’s “Sliced Bread – Toast”. It was fascinating in its own right, not least because I used to buy boxes of product on the internet to use in creativity programmes for corporate executives. But it was to the Brexit connections that I was drawn. Let me summarise some of the key points from the programme.

Izal Medicated Toilet Paper was invented by accident in 1885 after they noticed that one of the by-products of coal processing had antiseptic qualities. Izal disinfectant was eventually followed by Izal toilet paper. It was positioned as the only safe way to protect yourself against bum germs. Izal claimed to help prevent influenza, typhus, even malaria, having been launched shortly after the Spanish Flu outbreak in the 1920s. Sadly, the claims made about the product’s efficacy were completely false, based on the disinfectant rather than the toilet paper. I was reminded of Boris and Nigel’s claims about Brexit, which have been shown to be completely false.

Interestingly the programme plotted the steady decline of Izal as a brand, following the advent of soft toilet paper in the 1950s. People literally stuck to Izal in the face of the carbolic smell, the fact that the shit slid off the paper onto your fingers and the bum cuts that resulted from this unyielding product. Some preferred to use newspaper to wipe their anuses or ani. In Yorkshire there was resistence to toilet tissue, based on the fact that some Yorkshire men felt that softness was seen as a bit ‘gay’ (used in its modern context here). However more cosmopolitan wipers in London adopted the soft tissue product. Much the same as Brexit really with more countrified areas voting for Brexit and cities rejecting it. Johnson and Farage projected an alpha male view onto the softer minds in British society of “taking back control” and “avenging forin invaders”. It’s all so transparent and false at the same time.

Izal limped on however. A Government commission even concluded that Izal must continue to be used in all public places, forgetting to mention that the main reason for this was that nobody wanted to steal it. Izal continued to be popular with an older demographic who preferred to cut their arses, have shit on their fingers and smell like Jeyes Fluid rather than clean up. The Brexit mind is similar, in so far that people want things to be like they were, a golden age of the 1950’s where men were men, typhoid made a man of you, women were quiet, pints were in straight glasses Winston cigarettes made you cool and so on. The Raise the Colours idiots exemplify this faux nostalgia,