There are plenty of places where you can get a guide to the quality of eating establishments around the campus... but what about afterwards? When your bowels start to shift, where should you head? Here is the highly tasteful Barefacts guide to the best toilets at the University.

A quick note before we start - since the author of this article is male, the toilets reviewed are, of necessity, all male too. Besides, there are actually many more male lavatories in the academic buildings than female ones, due to the design of the "toilet towers" on the staircases between buildings.

Students' Union: The refitted Chancellors toilets are quite nice, actually, and of course, they are rather handy if you happen to have just eaten in there. On the minus side, they tend to be quite busy, so unless you have no objection to dozens of people hearing your every log as it hits the water, it might be an idea to find somewhere a little quieter. As for the toilets in the main Union building, with the exception of those near the Sabbatical Offices, avoid at all costs. There are at least two events more likely to occur in these dirty cubicles than simple excretion. Plus you have to jam your foot against the door to hold it shut; due to the distance between toilet and door, this is an impossible task unless you happen to be at least seven feet tall, or unless your anus is just below neck level.

Roots / Hall Complex: Since these have been refitted recently, too, they are quite pleasant. The door locking mechanism is a little simplistic, and you do have to walk about ten miles just to get to the first cubicle, but these are minor gripes. There is even a shower adjacent to them, so that you can hose yourself down if you do not quite make the ten-mile walk in time... Or so that you can freshen up after a long walk / cycle ride into university or, better yet, so you do not have to plod the miles home and then back again before going to an FNO.

Library: As befits a library, these are very quiet, which is fine unless you yourself are making a lot of noise. There are some excellent graffiti to be sampled, some dating back many years. Unlike the Union, the doors are so close to the toilets that you have to stand more or less inside the bowl to get the door closed.

Rushes (Library Restaurant): This is more like it. Never particularly busy, even at mealtimes, this is a good place to relax (with or without a book and a custard doughnut) and let nature take its course.

Lecture Theatres: These are purely functional. Some of the flushing mechanisms are a bit dodgy, so you may be unable to avoid leaving evidence of your visit. Methods of dealing with "floaters", along with advice on what to do if you run out of toilet paper and other common lavatory-related problems, may be featured in a future issue of Barefacts.

Austin Pearce: The toilets here were lovely - for the first two weeks that the building was open; very much like the rest of the building, in fact. Sadly, and perhaps due to the fact that they are open to the public 24 hours a day, they now smell worse than the staircase at the Bedford Road car park. And that really is saying something.

Academic buildings: The facilities here vary a great deal. In the staircase between BB and BC buildings, the toilets have been recently replaced to quite a high standard. At the other end of the scale, both the lights and the fans in the toilets in AA building are frequently out of service. Plus there is only one cubicle per toilet, so if you wander in there looking for a good spot to go, and it is engaged, you have to walk straight back out again, making you look like an idiot. The very best place for an extended piece of colonic evacuation is at the bottom of the stairs between AB and AC buildings. There are no urinals in there, and hence it is only rarely used, so you can make as much noise - and smell - as you desire without risk of disturbance. In fact, if you have to choose a location, then the very top or bottom of any building tends to be best - it is both less busy and more likely to contain an adequate supply of toilet roll. However, using the amenities in your own department dramatically increases the chances of your tutor or head of department entering just after you have generated the most foul odour known to mankind, and therefore should be strictly avoided.

There is another phenomenon associated with the toilets in academic buildings: the cubicles there have been fitted with a teleport system. Thus you can settle down to a quiet dump, only to emerge ten minutes later from a lavatory on a completely different floor and building to that to which you (thought you had) entered.

Accommodation: All the Courts of Residence, except Twyford Court, have shared toilets. The ones in Guildford Court are particularly notorious for size, but it is the whole principle of the collective amenity that is most dangerous: spending half an hour producing excrement of perfect colour and consistency is unlikely to endear itself to your housemates, who may have had to "tie a knot in it" while they waited, only to be suffocated in grossly unpleasant fashion as soon as they finally get a turn. Stag Hill Court is the worst for this; with toilets shared between only two residents, it is easy to tell who it was that created the offensive aroma in question. Most Twyford and University Court bedrooms have en suite facilities but, of course, this puts the residents in something of a dilemma: for if they decide to use their own private bathroom, then they must live with the immediate consequences until the dangerously inefficient fans have done their work.

In conclusion, the ideal place is one far from your own department and house, in a location where few people can be bothered to go and you are unlikely to bump into anyone you know... unless, of course, you are into synchronised discharges or other group excretion games, in which case, you really need a whole row of cubicles together - which has to be the Lecture Theatre building. Enjoy!

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