The cost of a pee

Kathy Will...now there's a name to conjure with.

Kathy is a woman of many parts: doting grandmother: head cleaner at the City Chambers; landlady at the White Horse inn at the Canongate; active member at St Patrick's Church...she has many tales to tell and all of them worth listening to.

The other day she shared a little anecdote that set me pondering: her pub, not the usual tourist trap, is pretty much the working man's local and is suffering badly from the smoking ban. She claims many of her older customers, ex-servicemen from Whitefoord House, don't come to the pub anymore and instead, sit in their wee rooms having a nip and fag (what does that do for social inclusion, I wonder?). As a result, her takings have dropped.

Bad enough, but made worse by the fact that tourists keep popping in to use her toilets. Each pee, she tells me, costs her money when they flush the loo, wash their hands and then dry them with the electric dryer....and none buy so much as even a half pint shandy.

So she is about to ban the use of her loo by anyone except paying customers...it never occurred to me that business can stand or fall on such small courtesies.

In Glasgow yesterday, I went to use the toilet at Queen Street Station and turned away disappointed since I didn't have a 20p coin and all the adjacent signs said 'no change given'.

It made me think of Kathy...