KUDOCITIES: OK, let’s start with a bit of background. According to your site, you’ve been in London since 1999, but whereabouts in Yorkshire were you born and where do you live now?
ROSE GEORGE: I arrived in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, at the age of six months having been born in Sunderland. That makes me, technically, a Mackam, but I feel more like a Yorkshirewoman. Not least since they changed the rules at the Yorkshire County Cricket so that now even people born outside Yorkshire can play for the county. I can’t stand cricket but for some reason that pleased me.

KC: You were invited to Saddam Hussein’s birthday party twice. How did that come about? Did you feel disappointed that you never actually got to meet Saddam? How did you feel about his execution this year?
RG: The first time was in 2000. I had been working at Colors which by then – after having offices in Rome then Paris – was back in the mother ship at Benetton HQ in the northern Italian town of Treviso. Next door to the Colors office, a gorgeous restored little villa with a view of the Dolomites, was Fabrica, which used to be a Bauhaus-y kind of place with lots of foreign students (now it seems to be a free ad agency for Benetton but that’s another story). Two students were Boris and Georgi from Bulgaria. We all left Treviso, and Boris and Georgi were invited to the Baghdad Photography Festival of Love and Peace, part of a series of yearly celebrations organised around Saddam’s birthday on April 26. Non-aligned nations like Bulgaria were invited, along with a lot of Yemenis, Jordanians, Japanese and the odd nutty American. At the time there was an Iraqi interests section squatting in the Jordanian embassy in London. I asked if I could go too. They said yes. The next year they invited me back because they obviously didn’t read Arena. Or they did and were sophisticated enough to know that no-one could be nice about Saddam. I think it’s the former.

Iraq was a strange and frightening place. It was frightening because everyone was frightened to varying degrees. Of course the kitsch was appealing – the Saddam watches, the endless images of the great leader – but it got wearing. Each year there was very little photography involved in the photography festival –and not much love and peace either - and instead lots of propaganda-related trips to show how Iraq was suffering under the sanctions. It was, but partly because Saddam’s regime was pocketing everything. The highlight of the trip was a boring rally in Tikrit, Saddam’s birthplace, which was held in a parade ground decorated with pastel chalk drawings of flowers on the tarmac. There was lots of parading and dancing, all overseen by a balcony-full of fat men with black moustaches wearing olive green uniforms. I think now that it was most of the pack of cards of Iraq’s most wanted. But Saddam was never there; I only saw him on TV. At the rally, everyone was all smiles – Iraqis are very nice, hospitable people – until Georgi and Boris tried to leave and the guards descended and mimed putting handcuffs on them. Two French photographers were arrested for taking photos from a bridge near Saddam’s palace. And once a Jordanian photographer unrolled a massive poster of Saddam and his two vile sons, on the lobby floor of the Sheraton and there was mass panic; everyone ran over yelling at him to take the president off the floor. It was moments like that that made me realise I didn’t want to meet Saddam. The closest I came was to Uday Hussein’s personal secretary, an overweight man in an Armani suit, who shook my hand by the banks of the Tigris and said “Miss Rose, next time you come to Iraq don’t stay in a hotel. We will give you a personal residence.” As I knew that Uday Hussein was notorious for raping and murdering women, and that sometimes he set his dogs on them, I smiled sweetly and made my excuses.

I was on a beach in India when Saddam was executed. I read the news in an internet café the next day and actually made a loud exclamation. I was shocked. I didn’t think they’d execute him. I didn’t see how it was politically useful for a start. And I was shocked by what a disgusting cock-up it was. I am not in favour of the death penalty and would prefer to have seen him locked up in a small cell for the next thirty years. But I am glad his revolting regime was overthrown, though the reasons were mendacious and the consequences have been and continue to be sickening.

KC: What’s your favourite Oliviero Toscano story?
RG: Luckily by now most of my memories of OT are a blur. I liked the fact that he ran Colors magazine for years and never once pronounced it properly. It was always “Color.” I liked his Olio Vero Toscano olive oil that he produced on his ranch, and that his best friend in Treviso was a dodgy pest controller with a dreadful toupee. I found his misogyny quite funny in the end; I had a picture of him on my notice board surrounded by three of his (male) favourites with the caption “lest we forget the limits of emancipation.” The one incident I do remember is from one evening when we were on deadline, and he came in and I must have argued with him about something and he said, “You know, I met Tina Brown recently and she’s everything you’re not. She’s pretty, smart and talented.” He could be a bastard. But in retrospect, I’m glad I knew him. I don’t think he’d talk to me now.

KC: Your article on the London sewers is absolutely fascinating. Would you recommend a trip to the sewers? Is that what led you to start writing about shit?
RG: I’d certainly recommend it, but only if you’re interested in sewers, which I am. Some of London’s sewers are beautiful, especially the old Bazalgette-era brick ones. Also you get to wear dressing-up gear like thigh-high waders and titanium-studded boots. The sewers weren’t what got me started on shit. Over the years at Colors we’d often feature toilets of one sort or another. The cover of the Wealth issue was a gold toilet. Then Toscani had the idea of doing a coffee table book called Cacas, which is 115 pages of pictures of animal – and one human – shit and lots of interesting stories about it. I thought the stories were fascinating. I think it’s fascinating that something common to everyone is so ignored and that something so basic as how to get rid of human excreta has yet to be properly solved. 2.6 billion people don’t have a toilet. That means 2.6 billion people have to shit on the roadside or on the beach or the train tracks or into plastic bags. Yet cleaning up feces-contaminated water reduces diarrheoa – which kills a child under 5 every 15 seconds – by 80 per cent. That’s partly why I’m writing about it. And also because you get to meet South Africans called Trevor who introduce themselves with “Hello, I’m Mr. Shit.” The people who work in this field are great.

KC: Tell us a little more about your book. What’s the book called? What kind of research are you doing? Is it a serious study or merely toilet reading? Is it a book that you could read in one solid stretch or more like something you could dip in and out of when the mood takes you? Are you nervous at all about publishing what is essentially going to be a gift for reviewers and would-be wags everywhere?
RC: The working title is Waste Matters, but that may change. I’ve been travelling the world looking at various topics eg. biogas in China, open defecation and how to solve it in India, a few toilet conferences here and there. I’ve still to go to Africa, probably to Tanzania and South Africa, and to research the toilet paper industry – and go down more sewers – in the US. It’s reportage. I hope that means it will be readable, entertaining and serious all at once. I don’t care where people read it - toilet, tube, whatever – or how long it takes them. But it is emphatically not a book of toilet humour. More like a journey through the world of shit and people who work in it. I’m not nervous. I’ve already heard all the shit puns and had the jokes. If the only way people can talk about it is to laugh about it, fine. That’s better than not talking about it at all.

KC: What has the study of excrement taught you about human beings?
RG: It has taught me that the assumption – in the developed world at least – that progress has been achieved is an illusion. We think flushing a toilet gets rid of “waste”. But 90 per cent of the world’s sewage still ends up untreated in the sea. Nearly everyone reading this will have swum in shit at some point. It also taught me that humans are ingenious and splendid creatures.

KC: What’s the most irritating thing about London?
RG:The prices.

KC: What’s the most invigorating thing about London?
RG: The fact that the whole world lives here and is usually to be found all at once on the top deck of the number 30.

KC: Most memorable tube experience?
RG: I don’t take the tube much. Maybe when I attended a posh function once and drank one glass of white wine, which must have been off or something because on the way back to Tooting, where I was living then, I got off at Clapham North and vomited all over the platform and no-one helped me, though I wasn’t drunk.

KC: Most memorable cab experience?
RG: Er…Did I mention I have a terrible memory?

KC: One London building you would gladly knock down?
RG: Probably one of the cheap crappy apartment buildings built in the Docklands by cheap crappy building firms.