Pauline Nevins

“We’re having a run on loo rolls over here,” my brother Kevan informed me during his call from England. “Loo rolls?” I said, initially confused. The call came just before lunch and my thoughts went to food – sausage rolls in particular.

“You’ve been in America too long,” Kevan said, laughing. Then the penny dropped. He was, of course, referring to the unfathomable hoarding of toilet paper in the U.K., as it is in the U.S.

Kevan and I went on to reminisce about our childhood in Britain, when the toilet paper nailed to the inside door of the outside lavatory were pages of The News of The World – nicknamed “The news of the Screws” because of its salacious content – a fitting final resting place, some said. I stayed long enough at my mother’s house to experience the graduation from newspaper to toilet paper, albeit the waxy kind that did more harm than good. This subject was the topic of a conversation I’d had earlier in the U.S. with a friend.

“I have shelves of toilet paper and paper towels in my garage,” she confessed. “When I was a starving student I felt comforted when I had a supply of these products, even if I was short on food. I continued this habit even as I got older and better off.”

I didn’t pretend to understand.

Our conversation switched to families. Several months before “sheltering in place” became the norm, her 5-year-old grandson visited.

My friend told me that one morning her grandson, who called her ‘Nene,’ asked to use the toilet. “Our guest bathroom was occupied,” she said, “so I led him to the toilet in my bedroom. I busied myself in the kitchen. Realizing he’d been gone a long time, I started to check on him when he reappeared.” She asked her grandson if he was OK. She said he hesitated and then said, “Nene, why do you have a bafftub for your kitty cats?” My friend, thinking her grandson was referring to her claw-foot, cast-iron tub, told him the bathtub was not for the cats, that it was Nene’s tub. She said her grandson responded with an emphatic, “NO, not THAT bafftub. The widdle one.”

“The little one?” my friend said, as confused as I was with Kevan’s loo rolls.

“Yes, the widdle one wiff the water that does this ...”

She said her grandson flipped his fingers up and down vertically in the pantomime of a jet stream shooting up.

It was then that my friend realized why her grandson had taken so long in the bathroom, and why he thought she had a bathtub for her two cats. He’d discovered the bidet!

“You have a toilet paper stash and a bidet?” I practically screamed in the phone. “I know,” she said, sounding smug, “both pre-coronavirus. The downside is I’m afraid to open my garage door for fear of either being robbed or arrested.”

Kevan enjoyed my friend’s story and went on to ask if I remembered what the word Corona meant to us as kids, growing up in England. I did. These were the days when everything from kippers to coal was delivered to the door in our neighborhood. The Corona Man delivered bottles of delicious fizzy pop. He was second only in popularity to the ice-cream man. He’d drive up in an electric vehicle, wearing a non-descript smock over his regular clothes. He’d jump out of his vehicle, grab a metal basket containing half a dozen tall wire-topped bottles, and be greeted by a smiling mum at the front door.

There was a “money-back guarantee” on the empty glass bottles, which resulted in more than a few tussles in our house as we wrestled each other for our only source of pocket money.

Writer Phil Carridice has posted the history of the Corona pop company on his BBC Wales History blog. The pop, writes Carridice, was produced during the 19th-century Temperance Movement. Apparently, the Rhondda Valleys in Wales were flush with coal mines and pubs. The miners, after hours spent inhaling coal dust, developed powerful thirsts. Drunkenness was rampant. Two Welsh grocers – William Evans and William Thomas – hit on the idea of producing the Corona pop as an alternative to alcohol. The pop became very popular … as a beer chaser.