I had to travel to Brighton yesterday for a meeting about the opera. Being a man of a certain age I found I needed to use the loo when I arrived at Brighton Station. If only I'd gone on the train (oh, wait - I did) because it cost 20p to take a leak.
Daylight robbery, I thought. Until later in the afternoon when I arrived back at Victoria Station and found myself once again needing to take a leak. The cost of urination in London turned out to be 30p.
They must think Londoners are made of money.
The meeting took all morning and I went to the toilet twice. It was free.
We did drink a lot of coffee is my excuse.
The general view is that the libretto draft that I have provided will generate between two and half and three hours of stage time. As we were aiming for around 80-90 minutes, there will obviously have to be some cuts. I'm fine with that. The only problem is that Ed Hughes, the composer, is reluctant to lose a single word!
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3 comments:
Last time I went to the loo in Brighton station (I don't have many anecdotes that begin that way), the gents was just a completely empty room with a sunken trough at one end. Maybe they're charging so that they can save up for a bit of porcelain?
Is the expression "peeing" for the act of urination a reference to the cost of using station toilets?
I'd always wondered where it came from...
Hi Rob, there's a bit more to it now. They have managed to put in some porcelain. Maybe we're paying retrospectively.
Hi David, I think 'peeing' is just a polite euphemism for pissing. In the old days pennies were abbreviated with the letter 'd' - £ for pounds, s for shillings and d for pence. Don't ask me why. P came in with decimalisation to indicate 'new pence' as they were called at first. People used to speak of 'spending a penny' - that being the amount it used to cost to work the coin-operated lock on a toilet cubicle. Spending a penny was another euphemism for taking a leak... or doing a big job, if necessary.
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