Are you old enough ...

...to remember when toilet paper wasn't normal?

Like toilet paper that comes on a roll with perforated sheets.

I heard from people older than me that some parts of the usa and canada, didn't embrace toilet paper on the roll as late as the 1970s.  In the 1990s, two of my classmates homes used the almanac option.  And many places in the world have found better ways.

Something got me thinking about toilet paper.   It's ubiquitous and feels like it's always been normal.  But we still have living memory of a time when it wasn't. It's funny how quickly we adapt.

I’m old enough to remember school toilet paper that came in cardboard boxes, interleaved sheets that were thin and shiny and not very absorbent let alone effective.

Public parks and camp sites had long drops - a literal hole in the ground with sheets of old torn up newspaper threaded on a string.

I might have been real young though I remember this:



source

My neighbor is not that old but remembers her mother feeding them acorns. She would leach them in cloth bags in streams—I don’t know what they did after that, either boiled or used for meal. I was overjoyed to hear that this was still a tradition in living memory and am hoping to try the old way of leaching some time. I also hope to teach younger people about acorn leaching and cooking. The river floods ferociously and it might be risky, unless there is a pulley system for emergencies.

This neighbor also has no taste for puffballs being fed too many as a child.

As for toilet paper, my usual is a clump of Norway maple leaves (used like a corn cob) or sometimes a brown paper towel.

Afraid so!   Quartered sheets of the Radio Times on a string in the outside toilet, which often froze in the winter.  Also the interleaved sheets of shiny "not fit for purpose"  resembling today's baking paper. I can't remember how old I was when "proper" toilet paper made an appearance.  Covid lockdown initiated serious thinking on the subject when the supermarket shelves emptied and/or the rolls were rationed, especially since we are connected to a septic tank system.

I thought that dreadful waxed toilet paper was just a 1960s NSW schools thing, but it sounds as if it may have spread further. I hadn't seen a flush toilet before starting kindergarten, and definitely remember the cut up squares of newspaper on a string. The older the newspapers the better, the ink was less likely to leave black marks behind.

I can remember the waxed paper, if it can even be called paper, in school through the 80's and my younger brother can remember it later than that into the 90's, this was in the South West of the UK, not sure if it varied from region to region, maybe it was a local council budget thing!