Editorial: To get ahead, get loos

I had thought the number of toilets in my house - three - was cause for some sort of secret shame, but I reckoned without Ellen DeGeneres, "queen of bathrooms" as she's known in Los Angeles. To her I'm just a hillbilly.

DeGeneres buys and sells properties as a lucrative sideline to her already lucrative TV career. A report this week says she specialises in adding more bathrooms, no matter how many there are in the house already, and that bathrooms are the new status symbols in Los Angeles, where a mere Prada handbag won't get you a second glance at your local McDonald's.

Social rank can be measured, apparently, by how many people can be using your facilities at once, with a guaranteed decent flush at the end of it, and how few need to take more than three paces to find one. You'd need a full-time bathroom worker, busy polishing taps, replacing toilet rolls, and wafting perfume about - and why not? They go for this sort of thing abroad, where tired older women in department store powder rooms present hand towels in exchange for a few coins left in an artfully placed china dish. You wouldn't be scribbling rude things about your rivals in love on their toilet doors.

I take an interest in plumbing, having sworn an oath never to go where there's no flush dunny. This has meant missing many a camping holiday or tramp into rugged hills, and how glad I am. Where I'm concerned, a decent flush is all: I'm lost in admiration for the Christchurch people, so many of them, who stoically coped without one for so long last year.

I grew up in a house with one toilet, as I suspect we all did. It was across the back porch, which was open to the weather, and a bit scary at night. My boarding school, with pretensions to poshness, had a whole two toilets between 20 of us in the junior boarding house. We queued for the doubtful joy of a pre-warmed toilet seat behind a plastic curtain. If DeGeneres had been about we'd have had a dedicated dunny each, possibly with a well-stocked bookcase, and definitely with a working lock on the door, an unknown luxury in my childhood.

There must be a hidden, meaningful code locked into different nationalities' plumbing. The Germans have weird shelves not far below the seat so you can take a scientific interest. The Chinese, if you're not careful, offer a hole in the ground in the middle of a small room which, put it this way, you wouldn't enter willingly with a flick knife in your back. The Japanese, blissfully, have toilets that play tunes, with permanently warmed seats that give you a warm wash and dry at the touch of a button. As for us, we usually have a wobbly seat, have nearly run out of paper, and - whose idea was this? - have those U-shaped fluffy mats on the floor to catch accidents. Revolting.

We've been slow to catch on to status plumbing, if our real estate ads are anything to go by. The en suite bathroom, just the one, is a status symbol still, rather than one each, one for the cat, and several over. I've only ever seen one bidet here, which shows how lacking in fun we are. What must Sir Peter Jackson's sophisticated foreign actors, used to three bathrooms each, think of our quaint little Wellington ways?

Are they perhaps like Swedish film-maker Ingmar Bergman, whose autobiography I'm currently reading, who had quick getaway issues to the bathroom all his life? Possibly this would account for the underlying anxiety that drives Beverley Hills thespians and celebrities to pay multiple megas not to get caught short on the parquet. It certainly lends new lustre to Hollywood gossip.