Hallelujah Toilet Paper

Three weeks ago my toilet paper ran out.

This is my last sheet. Vale toilet paper.

In these coronavirus times, official government advice when sneezing is to either sneeze into your elbow or blow your nose on a tissue and throw away the tissue straight away. But now tissues have become as precious as toilet paper.

Luckily I had a couple of tissue boxes, so I began using tissues instead of toilet paper, cutting each tissue in half to stretch my supplies.

I hadn’t seen any toilet paper on the shelves of my local supermarket for 5 weeks. During that time the shelves remained bare. I heard about rumours of toilet paper sightings from friends. Unfortunately these sightings weren’t reliable. As soon as toilet paper was spotted, it vanished a couple of hours later.

During this time I watched the British movie Their Finest on free-to-air TV. It’s about a team of film makers making propaganda movies during WWII. I was surprised to hear a character say, ‘They use film like lavatory paper.’ Pre-coronavirus, I would never have paid attention to this sentence, but now it seemed very significant. If this was historically accurate, it meant there was more toilet paper in London during World War II than there has been in Sydney during the coronavirus pandemic. It seemed people could use toilet paper with impunity during World War II in Britain.

Yet now toilet paper had become almost as mythological and elusive as yetis. I was at the point of writing a blog called The Elusiveness of Toilet Paper.

Then a miracle happened. Last week while grocery shopping at my local supermarket, I spotted a woman spotting a man carrying a large packet of toilet paper rolls. She asked him if there was a supply. He confirmed it. She quickly began hurrying towards the toilet paper shelves. I abandoned my search for antiseptic wipes and followed her. The hunt was on.

And there they were.

A modern retail miracle.

There wasn’t any choice apart from buying or not buying. There was a limit of one pack per customer. The packs were more expensive than I’d expected, but I bought the maximum limit I was allowed, and I’m now a proud owner of a 10 roll pack.

Maybe there will be an infinite supply of toilet paper from now on.

Hallelujah, toilet paper is in the building.