A few weeks ago, we saw an old roll of Izal toilet paper for sale in an antiques shop, quite a high-class antique shop in fact. They wanted £8 for it - £8!
For those who are too young to have known it, Izal was a smooth, non-absorbent toilet paper we are well rid of. I remember it from the fifties, although I think you could still buy it until quite recently. In the fifties, we had it in the bathroom where guests might use it. In the outside toilet we had a loop of string threaded through squares of newspaper.
I'm not sure which newspaper was relegated to the outside toilet in such a practical, yet undignified way. It was probably a mixture of the local paper and maybe the Guardian, or Manchester Guardian as I think it was in those days. It wasn't any better than Izal, but I suppose it was a cheap method of recycling waste paper.
7 comments:
Newpaper was marginally less painful than Izal.
But do you think you'll ever see some squares of newspaper on a nail for £8 in an antiques shop?
£8!!!
I'm sure you could find a slightly used, one careful owner, for a lot less than that!
Your picture brings back uncomfortable memories of my Catholic boarding school, where Izal was ubiquitous well into the 1980s; we used to wonder whether this was for reasons of economy or the purpose of mortifying the flesh.
On the plus side, we never needed to buy tracing paper...
MW - less painful but you could'nt use too much because it didn't flush too well.
DD - well it was tough enough...
MC - you could also make 'music' with it - comb and paper.
Ghastly stuff. £8?
The price of intimate nostalgia.
My parents used to take the Daily Mirror on the grounds that it made better toilet paper and the ink did not come off. Izal did make good paper aeroplanes and very sharp ink pellets. If you got a teacher working on the blackboard on the back of the neck with an Izal ink pellet he knew he had been hit.
Post a Comment