For this relief much thanks.

We were driving back from Roscoff on Tuesday, a drive of some 550 kilometers. We stopped after a couple of hours, as you do, for a rest stop for us and the dogs. After I had led out the dogs on a grassy area so they could perform their watering functions, necessarily in public,  I visited the `facilities` to perform the same task. The toilet block of this little picnic area was modern, in blue and white tiles and there was no door provided on the `Men`s` as is normal. A short passage with a dog-leg to prevent things being seen which should not was the normal lay-out. But, there, as usual the chicane was not sufficiently deep and I found myself quite visible to the outside, performing in public again. Now it`s not rocket science, the correct lay-out, any schoolboy with a piece of string could design better than this. However the French are not fools and one is left with the conclusion that it just does not matter to them.
   They have a much less prudish attitude to this very normal bodily function which surprises the more delicate British. Who has not seen at the side of a minor road a motorist, standing straddle-legged beside his car with no thought of retiring behind a hedge? Or a lorry-driver watering the off-side front wheel of his camion?  We once came across a twenty-strong peleton of cyclists, in their gaudy cycling outfits, bikes stacked in a heap, all engaged in filling a roadside ditch, a surprising sight even in France! Why do I never have the camera handy... I did have it to snap this notice on an alley in Lille, which expresses the French attitude to the problem.
   When I visited Paris in the sixties, the wide boulevards of the  Centre-Ville were well provided with Vespasiennes or public urinals, men only of course. This was a notorious arrangement of a curving cast-iron sight-screen, into which you walked. Having arrived at the end, you found a metal trough into which to perform, with little in the way of regular flushing, the smell was striking and pedestrians tended to pass to windward. Although the curving screen was better designed than the picnic area one, it fell short in another, surprising way--the screen only came up to chest-level, and down to mid-calf, modestly covering your centre section only. It was a weird sensation to be carrying on quite so publicly, able to look passing people in the eye,if you had the nerve! You could, I suppose, raise your hat to lady acquaintances or shout greetings to friends... I hope they drew the line at kissing or shaking hands! I was grieved to discover on Google that only one sole survivor remains, though interested to discover that they are named after the Roman emperor  Vespasian who had introduced a tax on urination... The mind boggles as to how it was assessed!

  Right, that`s enough of this unsavoury, though fascinating subject.  Bye for now, got to go to the loo....