Jem Beedoo: Time in the toilet can taint a lovely night out for dinner

The toilet topic becomes taboo before it's even considered a topic. Photo / APN

It's amazing how there is no such thing as a toilet critic and, conversely, food critics abound. The dark side of dining is as important as the dining per se, but people won't openly acknowledge this. In fact, the toilet topic becomes taboo before it's even considered a topic - a cause for absolute shuddering among diners. It's so flaming important though, so mathematically fundamental.

For many toilets at many restaurants, cafes and diners are so dire they're enough to put you off your food. This is totally bad business. Moreover, there is vast room for improvement across the whole hospitality game in the 1s and 2s departments.

How can a man, and especially a woman, be expected to not feel squeamish after being violated by a vile toilet experience? Heck, some of us walk out of even the finest of restaurants feeling thus because of insufficient hygienic attention paid to the porcelain.

I mean, for starters, some of the booths in the bathroom proper won't lock, leaving one apprehensive that at any moment their dearly private movements might become the visual property of a fellow diner none-the-wiser. That's if you're lucky enough to find the damned thing in the first place. Some of these restaurants, good ones even, have their toilets in impossible places, like through the kitchen and down a grimy flight of stairs, under another set of stairs.

Secondly, in the event of toilet paper being available, it is often more like sandpaper or, worse still, so brittle it's unusable. One needn't go into detail about what a mental and physical mess this can plop one into.

Thirdly, some toilets are so often in a state of splashed-out, soiled hideousness they cannot be used at all, but this is only speaking on the part of a male user of a male dunny. (We men tend to not notice the subtleties and nuances of bathroom tidiness, cleanliness and hygiene, as we're a bit too tall to see down into the bowl, among other factors.) Even so, it evidently isn't a punishable offence to leave a toilet in a state of multi-sensory stink by not cleaning up after oneself. In such instances, a greatly skilled toilet attendant could be very handy indeed. It would make dining life a lot more pleasant.

Fourth, a loo-user is frequently short-changed when it comes to washing and drying their hands, as the poor old Loser (Loo-user) regularly finds himself without soap or hot water, hand wipes, hand towels, a hand-dryer, or indeed any of the above. Rest assured, people, in such an ignominious event, that's not what jeans are for. Even having soap and hot water but no hand towels is a disastrous situation as the wetness left on door handles is insidiously slimy for the next poor Loser to get his unlucky hands on.

Lest we forget, some of these cubicles are so narrow, the man needing a wider berth owing to a wider girth (to speak for myself) has no room to put himself.

How can this be so? If it's called the hospitality industry, then why are these bathrooms and toilets so roundly inhospitable, so uninhabitable and so hostile?

It's a wonder we're not all in adult nappies when this semi-public loo-going has become so regularly harrowing.