Everytime I look at my toilet, I get depressed: this is what’s wrong about our times.

About 18 months ago, my husband and I gave our bathroom — which was a study in beige melamine — a makeover and, frankly, of all our renovation projects in our ’60s house, this is the one that came off the best. Sandstone floors, a sandstone wall; breezy yellow walls; a wooden Venetian blinds and a mobile made from sea shells picked up on the beach. We also invested in new handrails, basin and toilet. The latter had a pleasing modular design and is even environmentaslly friendly as it has two flush settings — one for pees that uses less water.

Trendy and modular... that toilet looks good from a distance.

The bathroom has been a source of pleasure ever since but now I’ve noticed that the toilet’s hinge is rusting.
How completely up the wazoo is that? It didn’t come cheap and I don’t think I’m alone in assuming you buy a commode for life. It’s hardly a fast moving consumable. Why on earth why I would grill the retailer on whether the hinge was stainless steel?

This says everything about our globablised manufacturing culture. Nothing is built to last — especially if you’re in a RDP house — and with China becoming the cheap-as-chopsticks manufacting powerhouse of our planet — everyone else in the rest of the world is cutting corners in order to compete.

An inspection of the nether regions of my toilet revealed that it is was made by Betta Sanitary Ware, which an online search told me is based in the Hecang Industrial Zone in Mingcheng Town in Foshan, Guangdong.

Now that's attractive... the rusty hinge.

Wikipedia says that Foshan is a city of about 5 million people in southern China and is famous for its porcelain. Well, that’s nice, but what about the hinge that goes with the porcelain of my loo? And where on this Godless planet am I going to find another hinge — and this time a stainless steel one with the correct measurments? I don’t have the slip for the toilet anymore so I can’t very well go back to the retailer in East London. I presume the hinge will continue its pathetic degradation and then the toilet lid will eventually fall off. Now that’ll go nicely with the sandstone floors.

It’s not that I have anything against the Chinese and, like most global citizen, I delight in consuming cheap goods like clothing, kids toys, DVDs… the list goes on.

I’m reading a fascinating book at the moment: “Where Underpants Come From” by Joe Bennet, who traces a pair of underpants he bought in New Zealand back to its souce in China as a vehicle for understanding our globalised economy. On a visit to a logistics multinational’s office in Shanghai, he discovers that just about the only thing that China imports is empty containers — for Chinese-made goods to be packed in and shipped out to the rest of the world.

I bet those containers are stainless steel.

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