En passant: Cold comfort à la loo

STONE ME, it’s been nippy! Cold as a frog’s tit; proper brass monkey weather. It was so cold one morning last week that I squealed
like a girl when I parked myself on the loo seat. Doris, all apprehensive, tapped on the door saying, “Are you alright in there?”
“I’m alright,” I said, wondering if it was actually true. I had goose-bumps like really coarse sandpaper over my entire body – yep, entire body, trust me. I had goose-bumps under my feet! Walking out of the loo it felt like I was wearing a new pair of some new
type of Dr Scholl health sandal.
“Oh,” said Doris, “it must have been Teaspoon making a noise.”  Teaspoon is the parrot, born (or hatched, I suppose) on a smallholding out on the Hlobane road, whose ancestors, although he doesn’t know it, came from equatorial Africa, and if asked (and assuming he could talk, which he can’t except for some gibberish) would probably presume that one of his forebears was a errant penguin from a remote and snow-swept island off the coast of Antarctica. It’s that cold.
And it’s only the middle of July – we are less than a third of the way through winter. I’m not going to get into an argument with anyone about whether or not mid winter is marked by the winter solstice, and the longest night, on June 21. It’s not. Winter
STARTS on June 21, and goes through to September 23 when spring begins (the first day of spring is NOT September 1). Winter is determined by average temperatures and not by the length of the day or night, finish and klaar.
This means, in effect, that I still have many more frosty mornings to include a frigid loo seat, and so later that day I said to Doris that I was going to throw all my inventive capabilities into the development of a heated loo seat.
Then I thought, Hang on, sunny South Africa is not really that cold, surely the Europeans, Russians, Siberians, Canadians etc, who have winters compared with which ours, even in Vryheid, seem balmy, surely they’ve already thought of a heated loo seat? Surely even the most rustic and manly Lapp squeals like a gelded reindeer when he drops his rods and parks his butt on a frost-bound loo
seat of a dark winter’s morn up beyond the Arctic Circle? So I banged “Heated toilet seat” into Google and got 1,150,000 results.

Yep, millions of people all over the world but mostly in the northern hemisphere already have heated loo seats. One heated seat I encountered “offers the luxury and comfort of a heated seat with the added convenience of a soothing illuminating LED nightlight.”

Their sales pitch says that with their seat, “you will be guided by the soft illuminating glow of the blue nightlight and comforted by the soothing heated seat, set to your personal temperature preference.” Why you should need a lighted glowing seat to guide you to the loo is not fully explained.

But the point is that even if I could invent a heated toilet seat, it’s been done before, not only heated by lit up too. So, what to do?
I have lived in a household (and have seen it in other households I’ve visited) where the solution to a chilly loo seat was to get some enterprising tannie or ouma to crochet a loo seat cover set – yep, a cover for the actual lid and a cover for the seat itself, in
matching pastel colours and sometimes with some floral decorasie. And then, I kid you not, sometimes there’ll be a matching doily for the top of the cistern and a matching crocheted dress on a Barbie-type doll whose legs penetrate, and whose dress disguises,
the spare loo roll kept on top of the cistern.

This I have seen, I kid you not. I have been to bazaars in Vryheid where such loo sets have been proudly offered for sale at a tuisnywerheid stall. I have to tell you that were I a resident of Vladivostok or Murmansk, the two coldest places I can think of, I would risk domestic wrath and months of winter sulking, and forbid such kitch in my loo. Is there anything less hygienic than a crocheted loo seat cover?
Heated loo seats are available in South Africa so I suppose I could throw caution and our municipal electricity account to the wind and invest in one. I don’t need one that glows in the dark, or plays “I can’t get no satisfaction” when you sit on it. The ones I’ve seen on the Internet operate at 12-volts so they don’t actually use that much electricity, and you stand little risk of sitting on the sanitarian equivalent of an electric chair.
But it strikes me that we have sunny winter days, so why not invent a solar heated loo seat, doesn’t that make

sense?
Watch this space…