Adventures with a bumjet

Unlike most of you, I'm not at home, but self-isolating with my parents in Dorset. Several years ago they bought a house here and have mostly refurbished it, but there are a few rooms still with their original decor, and one of these is my bathroom. It's a large and comfortable bathroom, well appointed. Very well appointed. Not only does it have a bidet, which as we all know is a special bath for your bum, it also, quite separately, has what I can only describe as a bumjet. A bumjet, for those of you who are having trouble imagining, is a hose, next to the loo, with a trigger on the end that dispenses a jet of water up your bum. (Or, to be fair, anywhere else you might choose to point it. But it's pretty clear what it is for.)  I have never used a bumjet before. The closest I have come was trying out a very sophisticated Japanese toilet imported by my aunt, which had two buttons you could push, one which shot warm water up your bum, and another which shot warm water up your bum at twice the velocity. A further button blasted your bum with hot air in order to steam it dry. As I had only done a wee, this seemed like overkill.  The bumjet in my bathroom, being a less cosmopolitan device, has no hot air function. This leaves me with the question, what am I supposed to do with my wet bum, post jet? I raise this question with my parents over lunch. Neither of them has ever deployed the bumjet. My mother suggests that one might wipe oneself with loo paper first, then exercise the bumjet to remove any lingering traces, and then dry off with more loo paper. This strikes me as insanely wasteful, not only adding water to your bum cleaning routine but also doubling your loo paper consumption. It is my supposition that the bumjet is designed to render loo paper superfluous. In which case, either you sit there and drip dry, in which case I am going to finish the last Hilary Mantel in record time, or you use a towel. There is a towel hanging next to the loo, but that's the one I use for my hands, and I think that all that advice to wash your hands repeatedly to avoid passing on germs might be rendered nul and void if I have a shared towel for hands and bum. Therefore I am going to have to use either my normal towel, or a separate, specially designated bum towel, either of which I will need to hang on the towel rail, which is located at the other end of the bathroom, meaning that I will need to waddle there, trousers around ankles, wet bum to the wind. At least the towel rail is heated, which I'm sure my bum will appreciate.  Under normal circumstances, I would probably let things lie at this point, leave all these questions to speculation and imagination, and allow the bumjet to rust in peace. However, these are far from normal circumstances, and if the past weeks have taught us nothing else, they have made it clear just how close we all are to running out of loo paper in a crisis. And besides, I have a newsletter now. I owe it to all of you to give the bumjet a try.  So. Having made this momentous decision, I await the call of nature, and let me tell you, nature does not want to call when it knows that there is a bumjet waiting for it. I am reading a book at the moment called Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith, about cephalopod intelligence, and it describes how octopuses have semi-independent 'brains' in their arms, allowing their arms to get up to things that their central brain has no involvement with or control over. My bowels are a bit like that. Take them hiking in Patagonia, say, or to Glastonbury Festival, and they are not going to cooperate AT ALL. Finally, though, they must have got curious, or just felt their responsibility towards you, the reader, because they carried out their part of the bargain, allowing me to do an experimental deployment of the bumjet.  The bumjet is attached to quite an unwieldy hose, and the trigger is very stiff, so it took a bit of contortion to get it into position. Eventually though I had it pointed in the right direction and activated the spray. It's quite a powerful jet, and at first it was cold, but very quickly it became clear to me that it had been plumbed into the hot tap and I was going to have to work fast if I didn't want to scald myself. Almost simultaneously, I realised that having chosen to hose myself from the back, I was ignoring all medical advice regarding the avoidance of urinary tract infections, by sluicing bum water directly into my vagina. I released the trigger, brought the hose round to the front, and started again. 

  In the words of Pretty Woman, big mistake. Big. Huge. When using the bumjet from the rear, a downwards angle is perfectly effective, but from the front, you have to point up. This turned the bumjet into more of a bum fountain, deflecting off my body and showering all of my nether regions and the entire surrounding area with now really quite hot water. I had to abandon jet and toilet entirely to mop up the seat, the floor, and towel off my entire body from the waist down (forget waddling to the towel rail with trousers round ankles, I just hurled those aside).  I cannot deny that I felt clean afterwards, so in that regard we can call the bumjet a success, but I think really it would be more accurate to say a qualified success. As with so many innovations, it's an excellent design for the male of the species. For the ladies, more thought is needed.  (With apologies to Hilary Mantel and Peter Godfrey-Smith, who probably never dreamed of being linked to under such tawdry circumstances.)