Hands up if you wash your hands after you have been to the bathroom AKA the bog? I would like to think that my loyal reader is always washing her or his hands because I see too many people who don’t. Visit any gents loo – this is possibly not a good idea for the ladies – and you will observe as many men returning to the bar who have not washed their hands and the last thing they had in their hand(s) was their penis. It is possible they got urine on their hands too but didn’t bother to put their hands under the tap. This is not a nice thought.
It has all become a bit of an obsession with me. I always, without exception, wash my hands but I am often following someone back to the bar who hasn’t. This means I have cleansed my own hands of any unwanted materials but I may have attracted some of theirs by opening the door. If said door handle is damp, I am paranoid for the rest of the evening. Indeed, I have recently started taking with me small hand wash bottles.
How about the trolley in the supermarket? Who knows where the previous hands have been? What if that person had recently defecated and failed to carry out the necessary ablutions? And how clean is that fresh fruit and veg? A friend told me a ghastly story the other day of a fellow customer in an Indian restaurant who had done a number two, failed to wash his hands and returned to his table, whereupon he put his finger through the Poppadoms he and his friends were about to consume. Oh how they laughed, not realising there was a fair chance they were about to consume some excrement with their Tikka Masala. My friend still regrets not telling the group. Knowing him, he would have done, too.
It’s not all men, of course, but it’s a lot of them. Men take their pints of beer into the pub loo which doesn’t necessarily strike me as scrupulously clean. I have seen some men – and some people may wish to look away now – finish a wee and then wipe their hands on their trousers. If one man reads this and realises it’s not very nice to walk around with urine on his fingers, it will have achieved something.
My life is not getting ruined by the constant thought of this, but everywhere I go and everything I touch is probably contaminated. Men stand at the urinals texting so think twice before borrowing a phone in order to call a cab to get home.
The train door, the junk mail through the post and that fiver you get in your change. You don’t know where it’s been but there’s a fair chance there might be some nasty things about. Wash your hands, eh? Just for me?
