Throughout those years my inside coat pocket was eternally weighed down by a lump that people who watched too much television might have mistaken for a revolver, but in fact it was a fat paperback, in which I indulged on the bus, the train, whilst waiting for either, and at any other opportunity—on the dunny, in the park at lunch-time. I never went anywhere without one, and so ploughed through volume after volume with blissful indiscrimination.

“I want to build a urinal, Tarfardel.”
“A urinal?” the schoolmaster cried out, startled and impressed. The matter, he saw at once, was obviously of extreme importance.
“Yes. A public convenience,” said the mayor….
…A place like Clochemerle, which had done without a urinal for a thousand years and more, hardly felt a need to suddenly possess three, particularly if it had to pay for them. And still less so, if it be remembered that the use of the urinal would involve some preliminary education for the inhabitants, possibly even a municipal decree.
   A few years ago a friend of mine got arrested in Moscow—”for pissing in the snow,” he confessed. “You cannot do this in Russia?” the arresting officer declared sternly. “Russia is a civilisated place. You are not in Paris now.”
   By then, of course, I’d been to France and enjoyed the freedom of pissing in the streets myself, but back in 1964 I was shocked. Surely France, focal point of the world’s culture and sensitivity… But here was Clochemerle, the very funny book by Gabriel Chevalier—which I bought only because it was the thickest book on sale at the Chesterville Road Newsagency and I was sure there was no danger of being amused by something with such a strange title, and certainly not at all to the extent I was. You might or might not have been able to relieve yourself in French streets, but you sure wouldn’t get away with it in the crowded 7.55 from Moorabbin—a danger which this very funny book several times threatened. Indeed, laughter itself was a startling and offensive act when in the midst of a carriage-load of blank face, silent commuters.