20 March—Spring has sprung. So when’s the next snow? Can you think of a better time to comment on toilet paper? Except perhaps Halloween.

It seems that Procter & Gamble, the world’s trend-setter in roll reduction, has shrunk the size of its bear-soft Charmin rolls yet again. This is what I wrote about the incredibly shrinking toilet roll last November in Passionate consuming:

“When I came back to the United States, a regular roll of Charmin (the only size available at the time) contained 650 sheets. Now that’s the sheet count of one of Procter & Gamble’s Charmin super-size rolls. You’ve got to hand it to P&G and their ad agency.

“I fully expect to see a Charmin roll contain one sheet in the very near future. And a Charmin nine-sheet lifetime roll. I’ll leave it at that. Charmin’s ever-shrinking toilet roll speaks more highly than any other toilet paper for bidets. And when you consider that orthographically bidet is only one letter away from our saintly president’s name, how can you resist the temptation to switch? (Orthoepically, of course, bidet is closer to the French composer who died at 36 and also to the French psychologist who came up with a silly intelligence test.)”

How long before P&G does actually market a one-sheet toilet roll and market it as the platinum ultimate in ecological waste reduction? Don’t laugh.

If you haven’t done it yet, this is an even greater incentive to install bidet toilet seats. In addition to all the other advantages of bidets, you’ll never have to buy toilet paper again.

Bidets and single-sheet rolls will never do for Halloween vandalism, of course. That’s where old faithful Scott 1,000-sheet single-ply rolls come in to save the night.

Scott has been rolling out thousand-sheeters for over a century. Kimberly-Clark bought Scott in 1995 and may, for all I know, produce the big babies at its New Milford facility, along with Charmin’s direct competitor Kleenex Cottonelle and other paper- and polymer-based products, including disposable diapers.

Bog scroll or bog roll is a delightfully crude, thoroughly descriptive—and therefore perfectly acceptable—British way of referring to what gentlefolk and some advertisers prefer to euphemize as bath tissue. Sure. But even the very word toilet has evolved in meaning. And we all know people who delicately refer to toilets as lavatories. In bathrooms with no tubs and powder rooms with no powder.

So what would you do in a lavatory?