We went camping a lot when I was a kid. My parents had five kids right in a row before they figured out what was causing them. This was bad for them but great for us; it’s amazing how efficiently little kids can construct the perfect society when there are so damn many of them, and being so close together in age meant that we were pretty good company for each other most of the time. Small conflicts did erupt from time to time, especially as we spent a lot of time packed into the car on the way to campgrounds — “Mahm, she’s breathing my air!”, “He’s vomiting on me!”, “She started it!”, that kind of thing. But mostly we looked out for each other.

When we arrived at a campground, the single most important piece of information concerned the possibility of swimming: was there, within a two-mile radius, a lake, river, canal, reservoir, swimming pool, kiddy pool, horse trough, dog-dish, hog-wallow, anything we could get wet in? That was priority one.

The second thing everyone needed to know was: is it the pinchy kind?[1]

The origins of this term are lost in the mists of time, but the pinchy kind referred to a non-flushing toilet, what normal speakers of English would call an outhouse. I am sure that the genesis of our name for it lies in some colorfully humiliating event suffered by one of my many sisters, and if any of them can recall it they are strongly encouraged to comment.

Just as the first child to catch any whiff of water, salt, fresh, or brackish, was duty-bound to immediately report it to the rest, so was the first to succumb to nature’s call required to deliver the news, ordinarily with a sort of grim stoicism, “It’s the pinchy kind“.

The reasons for shunning the pinchy kind are legion. My gravest fear as a small child was ‘spider bite on ass‘, or even just plain ‘spider on ass‘[2]. Flies. Sometimes the wet ziggurat of strangers’ effluvia approached the rim of the latrine. The smell of such mounds was not something we relished[3], lack of plumbing usually went hand-in-hand with no electric light in the toilet, they tended to be farther from the campsites than plumbed washrooms, and so on. Rarely, though, was actual pinching a real fear, at least as far as I remember — again, sisters are welcome to make corrections to my imperfect recollections.

I am moved to remember all this in part because this term the pinchy kind is yet another flapping owl (as that term is used by me), but also because toilets have been on our minds lately. Yesterday I installed yet another new toilet seat. In each of the three apartments I’ve occupied since arriving in Nova Gorica four and a half years ago, I have at some point had to replace the rooster-interface due to breakage. Assuming some base-line of average serviceability of the seats upon my taking occupancy of the apartments, rather than extraordinarily bad luck in inheriting extremely aged and decrepit seats, this works out to a dismal average of 18 months of service life per seat[4]. I am not here to impugn the quality of Slovenia’s toilet seats[5], but I had never had to replace a toilet seat before moving here. Toilets, sure, but just the seat? Where I grew up they were famously robust. Well, they had to be.

On Monday I arrived home and was invited by one of the members of the household[6] to examine her their bottom. “The toilet seat pinched me!” she they explained in a tone of the highest possible pique. I had previously noticed a hairline crack in the seat before which under body weight had shown the possibility of pinching. Indeed, there was visible damage to the skin. “That’s it,” I said resolutely. “I’m replacing that toilet seat.”

Because I will be goddamned if we’ll have the pinchy kind in our own bathroom.