‘What the hell is that?’ he asks, pointing down into the toilet-bowl. We all gather round. Eyes wide, mouth shut: I peer over the edge… what the feculence is it??

We honestly did not know. So, whilst huddled around the toilet, we each proposed possible names for the dunny-design: pooh pan, shit sill, reek rack, crap coop, dump deck, stool stool, poop plank, crud catcher, bottom box, piss pew, ‘bah’ bar, and a John Buck (this took some explaining by our American friend) were but a handful of shit-stirring suggestions.

It wasn’t until a quick Google search that we finally discovered that this invention was, in fact, an ‘Inspection Shelf.’ Nonetheless, this ass-holding piece of architecture really forces you to face your faeces!

You may ask: ‘Who would want to inspect their excrement so closely before sending it off to the sewers?’ Well, in addition to being a ghastly, dry-heaving design, the inspection shelf does actually have some practical significance.

Not only does the shelf allow a rather relieved individual to perform an easy health-check on their produce (like you would with urine colour and water levels), but there is also a blueprint for the betterment of hygiene in these toilets: there’s no ‘splash-back!’

Yet, no toilet experience is perfect, and the lack of water, as you may have discovered, could lead to, as is delicately put by my flatmates, ‘shit stains’ or ‘skid marks’. Whilst this may be embraced by certain students that enjoy a laugh over ‘skidders’, this does unfortunately make toilet-cleaning necessary more frequently than otherwise, no matter how much air-freshener your Dutch landlord has placed around the basin!

Someone suggested crafting a raft out of toilet paper that could settle on the shelf pre-poop to combat the issue. ‘This would then cleanly carry the crap from the bowl and down the drain… just like castaway’, they said. For me, this is not an issue: my toilet experiences are not so serene, and are better characterised as blast-aways.