This insufferable brand of toilet humour is not funny

Silly signs, daft names; why is going to a restaurant loo so tricky, Jay Rayner asks.

IAM standing in the basement of a restaurant, feeling the fear. Before me are two doors, marked with logos.

One is a circle with a crossed line pointing down; the other, a circle with an arrow pointing off to the right.

Of course, I should be able to tell which is which. But down here in the gloom, I am uncertain. I look at my phone, anxiously. Naturally, there’s no signal down here. I can’t check.

All I want is a pee. But I stand now on the threshold of an incident. Choose the wrong logo — the wrong door — and I’ll be the perv who barged into the ladies’ loo. I don’t want to be that perv.

Suddenly, a woman comes out of the door marked by the circle with the down cross. I grin at her gratefully. She looks at me as if, at the very least, I’m a candidate for suspicion. I rush off through the other door. Relief.

There are myriad ways by which restaurants complicate things. We know what they are: nonplate serving items, menus with print so small you need a torch to read it, waiters taking orders without notebooks and so on. But there should be a special place reserved in hell for those that, in a desperate effort to look smart or interesting, manage to complicate the simple business of using the loo midmeal by using wacky or, worse, completely indecipherable markings on toilet doors.

Anything — anything at all — that makes you pause, even just out of irritation, should be punishable by a massive fine, or at the very least extreme tutting. It starts with the most simplistic of pictograms, the ones that are so familiar we barely notice them any more, by which I mean those that insist women are instantly recognisable because they always wear skirts. (I’m rather taken by the oppositional reengineering of that image online, which shows it was actually a superhero’s cape all along.) Then the silliness begins.

At York’s Star Inn the City — a place with form; they used to serve bread in flat caps — the doors are marked ‘‘Olafs’’ and ‘‘Helgas’’, presumably because of the city’s Viking heritage or because the management hates its customers. Really! Stop it! Stop it now!

At the venerable River Cafe the men’s toilets are defined as such by being blue. The women’s are obviously, therefore, pink. A ballpoint pen manufacturer pulls that kind of stunt, and social media explodes.

There are so many more: the myriad Japanese places that mark them ‘‘samurai’’ and ‘‘geisha’’, which manages the neat trick of being annoying, a cultural stereotype and misogynist all at the same time; the gastropub which marks them ‘‘dolls’’ and ‘‘pistols’’; the seafood restaurant that marks them ‘‘gulls’’ and ‘‘buoys’’, which barely makes sense. And then there are all the graphic ones, giving topographical views of genitalia. God help us.

Apart from the fact that these are all the worst ideas from Planet Stupid, there’s another concern: that women will become as confused as I was, inadvertently walk into the men’s and discover the dreadful truth. All men’s toilets are disgusting. Men have issues with aim. It’s tragic, but it’s true.

The solution is obvious and, happily, already being adopted by some.

We don’t have genderdefined toilets at home, so why have them in restaurants? Scrap the word ‘‘men’’. Get rid of the word ‘‘women’’. Just give us a bunch of cubicles marked ‘‘toilet’’. It will do the job.

What’s more, it will save me both from the fear and, more importantly, extreme embarrassment. — Guardian News and Media 2018