Saturday 16th May 2009 – HoDo and the Black Urinal

There used to be a serial on childrens' TV in the UK called 'Catweasel'.  It was about an incompetent medieval wizard transported to modern times.  When he tried to wizard his way out of some situation, and, inevitably, failed, he would look, with some anguish, at whoever else was in the scene, and say, no doubt intending to sound Anglo-Saxon, "Nithing werks".   I now realise this was because of his astonishing age: I find myself continually in the same position.  This time it was the old eyes.

I had never seen a black urinal before Saturday.  And, not to put too fine a point on it, I failed to see one on Saturday too.  It was in a restaurant in Fargo, ND called the Hotel Donaldson, the 'HoDo'.  It is a bright, airy place, and the sun was blazing in.  I had finished my lunch and gone to the Mens' restroom.  Normally, nowadays, I have to pause for a moment in those circumstances until my eyes get used to the darkness.  But this restroom was decorated, undoubtedly by a lady interior decorator consumed by penis-envy, entirely in black.  Including, as the title implies, the urinal.  I thought I'd walked into a cupboard: after allowing for the usual adjustment time, I still couldn't see a thing.  I went back out to check the door, which, being back in the sunlight, compounded the problem.  With some difficulty, I managed to finish my business, hopefully in the right receptacle, and wash my hands, even more hopefully in the right receptacle.  I emerged back into the bright sunlight, which, of course blinded me again.  I lifted my arms to find some solid surface to cling to, and pinned a lady to the wall.  Gave her quite a fright.  I only hope it was the interior decorator, and my profuse apologies undeserved.

 

Thinking on it later, it occurred to me that 'HoDo and the Black Urinal' might be the first title in a new J K Rowlings series, about a failed sorcerer and his drinking adventures in the less salubrious parts of Edinburgh.  Or better still, 'The Black Urinal' might be another Dan Brown mystery, explaining why Howard Hughes kept all his urine stored in a cupboard, spending huge sums of money to find the lost original of the al-Hajar-ul-Aswad, the black stone revered by Muslims to this day, the original having been spirited away during the crusades, having been profaned, in a way you can now readily guess, by a fundamentalist society of Christian knights, a society to which Hughes, and all the powerful men in the western world have sworn alliegance.  Only to find it has been hidden, by a man-hating interior decorator, in a restaurant in North Dakota.