Chaos came to London’s public conveniences yesterday as a security crackdown resulted in huge queues crossing their legs and clenching their buttocks, whilst police carried out compulsory checks on everyone attempting to use one of the capital’s kazis. “It’s bloody ridiculous – I told them coppers I was touching cloth, but they told me I’d just have to hold on,” pensioner Harry Dunton told reporters, as he danced the crab-apple two-step whilst queuing outside the toilets at Waterloo station. “I’ve been here over an hour already, and I’ve still only moved two yards closer! I don’t know how much longer I can hold on!” Indeed, even as he spoke, one of Dunton’s fellow queue member’s stamina finally broke. A middle-aged businessman, his face red and contorted in agony, made a break for a nearby pillar, tearing at the flies of his suit trousers and shouting “Sweet Jesus!” as he ran. With a bellow of relief he finally let loose a golden stream of steaming urine against the pillar, only to find himself promptly arrested by two police officers. “I’m afraid that public urination is still an offence,” claimed Chief Inspector Gregory Toly, who was supervising the security operation, which included full body searches, metal detectors and specialist bum-sniffing dogs. “Public safety must come first. No matter how desperate these people are, they wouldn’t thank us if they found themselves blown up by a terrorist device just as they parked their arses on the pan!” The draconian new toilet security regime comes in response to the terrorist atrocities committed against public toilets in Westminster, Camden and Bloomsbury last month, in which several members of the public were seriously injured. “It was carnage in there,” says Reg Brollick, who survived the attack on the Embankment Gardens public toilets. “Smashed urinals were hanging off of the walls, the floor was covered with bits of broken toilet bowl and smouldering bog paper!” Brollick considers that he had a lucky escape – the man standing next to him at the urinals suffered severe head injuries after being hit by a flying toilet seat. “There was no warning – we were suddenly struck by this huge force and everything went brown,” he recalls. “It was like a tidal wave of shit – it seemed to come from one or more of the cubicles!” The authorities at first claimed that the explosions were the result of a ‘blow-back’ in the overloaded sewage system, but rumours of suicide bomb attacks quickly began to circulate. Witnesses at all of the devastated conveniences recalled seeing several Arabic-looking individuals entering the toilets’ cubicles shortly before the explosion. “We now believe that these three attacks were co-ordinated by a highly organised group of suicide bombers,” says Chief Inspector Toly. “We’re still not sure how they did it – one theory is that they created huge blockages by pouring grease down the toilets, then flushed them in unison! Another is that they overflowed the toilets by massive synchronised crapping with the aid of laxatives!” It has also been speculated that the suicide bombers induced fits of explosive diarrhoea by ingesting a combination of laxatives and semtex. Consequently, the authorities are taking no chances and searching everyone entering public conveniences for laxatives, grease and explosives.

However, local politicians fear that the new security measures could result in Britain’s capital finding itself awash in excrement. “It’s bad enough on Friday and Saturday nights when the pubs and clubs start chucking people out, but now we have the prospect of it all day, every day,” says Westminster councillor Frances Pills. “The police can’t arrest everyone peeing or taking a dump in the street!” Quite apart from the public health implications of the new toilet security regime, Pills and many of her fellow councillors are also concerned about the personal health risks faced by public convenience users. “The interminable queuing faced by these poor people is placing a dangerous strain upon their internal organs,” she explains. “Already we’ve had cases of several pensioners’ bladders exploding and at least one man had to have part of his penis amputated after he used a bulldog clip to try and stem the flow whilst caught in a particularly long queue at the National Gallery!” Although supporting the new security checks, London Mayor Ken Livingstone believes that the problems have been exacerbated by the city’s relative lack of public facilities. “If Tory councils hadn’t sold so many public toilets off to become pool halls and the like, there’d be no need for this queuing,” he told the press, before outlining his advice for public toilet users during the present security clampdown. “People must ask themselves if their trip to the toilet is really necessary – couldn’t you hold on until you get home? If not, we strongly advise that men carry plastic bottles at all times – for women, an extra large handbag could be a viable alternative. I’d also like to point out that for city bankers, stockbrokers and the like, the bowler hat can easily double for a chamber pot. If you really must do it in the street, then I would ask that you carry a ‘pooper-scooper’ with which to clear it up and take it home with you.” Frustrated by the lengthy queues, many Londoners have been taking advantage of obscure by-laws which allow them to legally urinate or defecate in the street. “It is true that if you urinate against the offside wheel of a parked vehicle, it is perfectly legal,” concedes Toly. “It is also legal to defecate on the Queen’s Highway, provided you shout a warning to other road users before dropping your load!” This latter legal loophole has resulted in severe traffic congestion in several parts of London, along with heaps of excrement so large that the police have been forced to advise motorists to treat them as roundabouts.

Responsibility for the original attacks has been claimed by an obscure Iraqi terror group, the Sons of Al Shattar. In a video shown by the Al Jizz Arabic news service, a man wearing a toilet-paper mask and brandishing a toilet brush condemns alleged unsanitary atrocities committed by British troops in Iraq. “The filthy bastards! They rested their unclean infidel backsides on the very toilet seat blessed by the bottom of Saddam himself,” he rants, in what is presumed to be reference to British troops’ use of the facilities at one of the former Iraqi dictator’s palaces which they had liberated. “The western barbarians make cheap jokes about us Arabs and our alleged toilet practices, but these British bastards – they piss all over the seats! They leave shit up the walls! How in the name of Allah is such a thing possible! And the floaters! It is an outrage! You desecrate our toilets, we will destroy yours!” Despite the video, Prime Minister Blair is refusing to link the London public toilet outrages with the war in Iraq. “Look, people were vandalising public toilets long before we invaded Iraq,” he told the Commons. “I distinctly remember an occasion in 1989, long before the war, when I was forced to piss against a wall in a back alley myself, due the urinals in the nearest public convenience having been smashed!” The police, meanwhile, fear that the toilet terror campaign could be escalating. “We’ve recently foiled a plan to booby trap the Queen’s private kazi at Buckingham Palace,” claims Chief Inspector Toly. “They were going to wire it up to explode if the weight of the person sitting on it suddenly decreased – if Her Majesty had taken a good hard dump, she’d have been blown to bits!”