I’m halfway through a stay in Japan, the land of the free public toilet. City squares, riverside walks, bus interchanges in the middle of nowhere – chances are there’s one waiting. The grubbiest are old but clean enough. The cleanest are like operating theatres. I think of days in British cities where you have to draw up a dot-to-dot itinerary taking in that Starbucks (customers only); that department store (if it hasn’t closed down); that museum (entry £5). And I’m a guy: we have it easy, I know. Why is public provision for this basic bodily function so dismal across the UK? I keep hearing this vicious rumour it’s because councils no longer have the money to maintain on ‘discretionary spending items’ like evacuating bodily waste. Call me a tofu-eating, wokeist Talking Britain Downer, but do you never get sick of systematically impoverished local government?

The days are getting warmer and my hair is getting longer, so I book myself in to my wife’s hairdresser’s off a quiet backstreet in Hiroshima. Only three chairs, black walls, no music and a blow-up landscape of a Sydney beach in a 1960s colour grading. Whenever I sit in a barber’s, I think of a continuum of haircuts, like a Richard Linklater film, from my regular boyhood barber shop in Upton-on-Severn, to a suspiciously homophobic barber in Malvern, then Canterbury, London, Hiroshima in the 1990s – a different Japan to now – and two decades’ worth of trims at A Cut Above in Clonakilty. There were memorable one-offs in Delhi, Palermo, Chicago and a lake town in Sichuan where marijuana grew as vigorously as bracken. I remember a friend who died a couple of years ago and I wonder how many more haircuts I have left in the Book of Fate.

QOSHE - Japan shows up Britain’s impoverished councils - David Mitchell
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Japan shows up Britain’s impoverished councils

8 5
21.03.2024

I’m halfway through a stay in Japan, the land of the free public toilet. City squares, riverside walks, bus interchanges in the middle of nowhere – chances are there’s one waiting. The grubbiest are old but clean enough. The cleanest are like operating theatres. I think of days in British cities where you have to draw up a dot-to-dot itinerary taking in that Starbucks (customers only); that department store (if it hasn’t........

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