Last week, I kept you waiting until the final paragraph of the post before explaining the cryptic title: ‘How Much does a Hole Cost?’ This week, I am changing this around, and starting with the explanation of the title, and then going on to explain its significance to this week’s topic.

My late father, as many of you know, owned a delicatessen and grocer’s shop in the large Jewish London suburb where we lived. The shop was a well-known and well-loved part of the community, as the long queues outside the shop on a Sunday morning demonstrated. There were, I am sure, two main reasons for this: first, the delicatessen items that my father sold were second to none.

All of his specialist items came fresh, daily, from suppliers in London’s East End that he had grown up with, and Dad was a master slicer of smoked salmon. When we buy smoked salmon in the supermarket these days, and discover that 200 grams yields 4 slices (or, more accurately, wedges), I cry. Dad would have conjured at least eight wafer-thin slices out of the same 200 grams, allowing you to savour the flavour without being overwhelmed by a fatty texture.

Similarly, even on a good week, the shmaltz herring I buy in the Machane Yehuda shuk – Jerusalem’s street market – is no match for the shmaltz Dad sold, and though I don’t do a bad job of cleaning and slicing the fillets, I know I’m barely fit to wash up Dad’s herring knife.

The second reason for the popularity of the shop was Dad’s broad smile and genuine pleasure in greeting and serving people. My brother told me last week that just recently a woman he does not know, on hearing his surname, recalled how much she had enjoyed shopping at Brownsteins and what a lovely man my father was (and that’s almost forty years after Dad retired).

Sunday morning was the busiest time of the week in the shop. Despite Britain’s restrictive Sunday trading laws at the time, Dad was allowed to open to sell fresh perishable foodstuffs on Sunday, and, between 8:00 and 1:00 on a Sunday there would be a constant stream of customers.

Every week Dad bought the same range of bread: brown bread (rye, with caraway seeds), black bread (like a pumpernickel), bulkas (a brioche-like loaf), platzels (known in Israel, inexplicably, as bagels, rather than as bialys), beigels (that’s how we spell them, east of the pump – Aldgate pump, that is, a historic former water pump dating from 150 years ago and notionally considered to mark the Western edge of London’s East End), knot rolls. Dad would buy the same quantities every week, but, on some weeks, he would sell out, while, on other weeks, he would be left with a pile of unsold bread.

The staff always had a superficially convincing explanation for bread sales. If the weather was good, and the bread sold out, it was obviously because everyone was going on a picnic. If the weather was good and bread sales were poor, it clearly meant people were out for the day and planning to eat out. If, however, the weather was bad and sales were good, it was a sign that everyone was staying in and needed to eat at home. Finally, if both weather and bread sales were bad, then obviously, knowing they could not be out in the open air, people were planning to drive to a restaurant to escape being trapped at home.

Dad’s explanation was much more scientific. Bread sales on a Sunday, he maintained, were a complete mystery: unpredictable and inexplicable. Given the size of his Sunday customer base, that seems statistically plausible.

All of which serves to explain why, in our family, any unpredictable outcome always invites the comment: “It’s like bread sales on Sunday.” Well, let me tell you that your response to last week’s post was like bread sales on Sunday.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much, if any, response to the post. Aside from it being a niche subject, it would, I assumed, exclude the distaff side of my readership. I also, in my naivete, was not expecting any of my readers – the majority of whom are closer to my age than my children’s – to disagree with the sentiments I expressed. However, to my astonishment, it proved to be a post that provoked a larger and quicker response than any of my posts has for some time. Clearly urination is a topic close to your hearts (though anatomically closer to your kidneys and bladders).

If you check back on my website to see whether anyone has left a comment (don’t worry; I am not deluded enough to imagine that anybody actually does this), you will know that three people commented publicly. It is true that only one exposed his preferred underpant technique for urination. The other two made more general and less personal comments, but nevertheless.

However, no fewer than four people wrote to me privately, within a couple of hours of the post going public. In addition, one reader linked to my blog in his own weekly blog post, and he tells me that the only response he received to his post last week was a comment on my post. Clearly, with my choice of subject matter last week I touched a nerve – metaphorically, I hasten to add – and I would like to share, under the veil of strict anonymity, some of their insights.

One friend told me that her husband calls underpants with no front opening ‘uncircumcised’. I love the fact that that is not only a neat and accurate practical description; it also offers a moral judgement on the heathen items themselves.

Another friend, who revealed that he has always pulled down the waistband, offered the rallying cry: ‘Free Willy!’, a slogan that suggests an advantage of the pulldown method that hadn’t previously occurred to me. The pulldown does, I accept, offer freedom of movement, and may therefore be more convenient and comfortable. It also, I now realise, makes hands-free urination an option, which may, one can only hope, account for the staggeringly high proportion of public convenience users who choose not to wash their hands after urination.

This very morning, after exercising, I uncharacteristically went to the toilet before changing out of my drawstring shorts and no-front-opening underpants. (I have just started exercising daily after a long period of couch potatodom and, when exercising, I wear the holeless underpants that I bought by mistake years ago.) In the light of all that I have written and read on the subject in the past week, I decided to try the pulldown method. While I cannot imagine adopting it other than when exercising, and other than in the privacy of my own privy, I will concede that I did feel a certain element of ‘Free Willy’.

Which is slightly unnerving. The conviction with which I set out my position last week should certainly not allow me to experiment with pulldown, let alone see any merit in it. I am left wondering which other of what I take to be my foundational beliefs can be so easily undermined. Can I really have been on this earth 76 years and still not know where I stand on urination? It seems I can no longer feel the solid ground of self-knowledge underfoot. Perhaps Mr Bean really is funny and Lord of the Rings is a great work of literature. I certainly hope not, but I’m not quite as certain as I was a week ago.

And on that unsettling note I think I will leave you for another week. But, just before I go, let me share with you a link to a video sent to me by a reader, which, I hope, will put this topic to bed for good: the gentleman’s definitive guide to urination techniques. You can view the utterly respectsble video here.

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