A beige toilet. That’s really the reason. Everyone was so touched and moved by my last post but if I’m going to get really truthful with you all, the real reason we’re moving from Bali isn’t the trash or the pollution or the death metal band that’s been screeching for 12 hours across the rice paddies drowning out the sound of the tile cutter. It’s not even the fact John has a great job in London (for 9 months). It’s the beige toilet.

It all started like this… (and now I think about it actually I’m wondering if this wasn’t orchestrated by the universe) …

The toilet won’t flush. I lift off the cistern lid, place it on the toilet seat and prod at the plastic parts inside the cistern like I have a clue what they actually do. After a few minutes of sighing and prodding I lose patience, turn to yell for John and knock the lid to the floor. It smashes into a gazillion pieces (and cuts my foot in the process).

This being Bali you can’t just head to HomeBase and buy a new cistern lid. No. You’re fucked. You have to buy a whole NEW TOILET.

Just SIGH.

So I go to buy a new toilet. I select one – white, normal, whatever – and head to the desk and ask for the price. They can’t find it. They spend fifteen minutes calling various people to find out the cost of the toilet. They still don’t know. After twenty minutes of this I tell them I’ll come back later.

I don’t go back later because I’m busy. I have a book to finish and three other books to promote and I’m spending fifteen hours a day working (this is also why I haven’t been blogging – being an author is REALLY HARD WORK. Why did no one tell me?) And days pass and I know we need to get a new loo… but when?

Then the time comes that I wake up one morning at my normal time of 5.30am. It’s dark. Needing a wee I grab my iPad to check my email en route. I prop the iPad on the cistern lid… but WAIT… there is no cistern lid.

And let me tell you now my $80 bomb-proof, splash proof, nuclear proof iPad case ain’t all it claims to be. It’s not cistern proof at least.

So we really need a new toilet before we drop any more expensive tech items into it but both of us being busy we decide to ask Komang, our handyman and sometime driver, to buy it for us. We send him off with clear instructions as to what to buy (or as it turns out maybe not so clear).

Nothing happens. This is Bali after all. Nothing happens for a week.

And then I come home and find this installed in our bathroom.

I’m not sure the picture does justice to the thing. It just looks like a toilet I know. It could be worse. It could be a hole over an open sewer. But the thing is, I  never knew that toilets could be uncomfortable until I tried this one. It’s like sitting on a ring of thorns. I’m sure there are spikes that are more comfortable than this toilet seat.

I looked at John and told him that after five years a beige toilet was going to be the thing to make us leave Bali. And what do you know…