Of course military situations vary. A friend who is in the Special Boat Services (as mean as the SAS but, well, with boats) told me that when he’s out in the field, they shit into a plastic bag and hide it under their helmet. Leave no trace. Where they can leave a trace though they might be interested in the DAAB: a 40 foot long shipping container of toilets that can convert “wastewater” into water conforming to EPA standards in 24-48 hours. One shipping container serves one battalion. And it can be controlled by the internet. Composting toilets would probably make more sense, particularly as the containers are supposed to be shipped to Iraq, where water supply is limited and it is somewhat irrational to pour it down a toilet, but still. Cool.

There is much seriousness too: this morning I sat through several hours of deep discussion about the new Global Sanitation Fund, and how to get private businesses such as banks and corporations to invest in sanitation in general, and in social sanitation entrepreneurs. I wrote about one such social entrepreneur in the book: Trevor Mulaudzi, also known as Dr Shit, who is somewhat singlehandedly attempting to clean the hideous toilets of South Africa’s schools. Trevor is a wonderful character with a deep and abiding laugh who charms everyone. But for years, he had no luck trying to persuade government officials to help him or fund him, as he wasn’t a non-profit, and as the concept of small businesses trying to do social good - to be social entrepreneurs - was unknown, he got nowhere. He has since has been awarded thousands of dollars by the admirable Ashoka, and is a finalist to be a fellow of the Schwab foundation, another generous money pot. The theme of the summit has been sanitation marketing, which is the curiously new concept that sanitation can be a business. Instead of seeing 2.6 billion people without toilets as a problem, the thinking goes, let’s see them as a business opportunity. Plastics and porcelain manufacturers; soap people; all sorts of businesses can get business out of sanitation. Poor people are poor, but they do invest. They’re just more cautious because, in a lovely phrase I borrowed from someone, “their money is busy.” The trick, then, is to use the right persuasion. Ideas have abounded: I particularly liked the female mayor from somewhere in the Philippines who proposed setting up themed toilets. Presidential toilets; Star Wars toilets; Supermodel toilets. “You pay and you go in there for five minutes and you get to feel presidential,” she said, to a room of giggling toilet experts. “Why not?”

Another Ashoka fellow, David Kuria from Kenya, proposed making toilets sexy and beautiful. “That’s the way the world is heading,” he said. “So if we don’t do that, forget it.” In Kenya, he has recruited beauty queens to open public toilets, and also got ministers to come and use them. “When poor people see that ministers use the toilet too, that persuades them to use it.” His toilets are for slum-dwellers, but they are always of a high enough standard that “you and I” could use them too. In the words of another of my favourite sanitation footsoldiers, Joe Madiath of Gram Vikas in India, “technology for poor people doesn’t have to be poor technology.”

I always get a kick out of the toilet crowd. Some of them speak too fluent development jargonese for my tastes, but most of them are committed and passionate, probably because they work in such a neglected field.

The summit is hosted in the Venetian resort, Macao. It contains the largest casino in the world (10,500,000 square foot) and is the largest single hotel structure in Asia. To get to a room-ful of development and finance specialists, whose pressing concern is how to alleviate a stunning public health crisis that is killing six thousand people a day, you have to walk for nearly fifteen minutes through casino after casino after casino. Even at 8am, there are full poker tables. The shopping mall upstairs has fake blue sky and fake Venetian canals complete with singing gondoliers. Along with the WTO event, there was a Miss International beauty competition going on, which meant the coffee-shop with wifi was often filled with young women with legs as long as the halls I had to walk. As if a three day summit of the World Toilet Organization weren’t memorable enough.

Not that it’s entirely Bush’s fault (for once): I read of one survey that found that taxpayers - in the UK, but I bet it translates - objected to a £5 increase in their water rates to pay for wastewater treatment improvements. That’s probably because they’re sick of reading about privatized water utilities posting large profits yet complaining they can’t afford proper upkeep. Even so, the fact that the average American family spends more on soft drinks - or pop, as we call it - than on wastewater treatment charges would suggest there’s some room for manoeuvre. Less pop. More activated sludge.

The Global Handwashing Day site is very developing country focused, which makes sense, as the children dying every fifteen seconds from diarrhoea live in Nepal, India, Bangladesh and a host of other poor countries. But lest we feel superior, consider this research from the wonderful hygiene team at the London School of Hygiene, which swabbed 409 commuters (as you could gather from the great BBC headline “fecal bacteria joins the commute”). They found that one in four people had faecal bugs on their hands. (And, shamefully, as I’m a northerner, the further north they swabbed, the more filthy hands they found.). This doesn’t surprise me, for two reasons. First, the valiant research of Dr. J. A. Cameron, an Oxfordshire doctor, who in 1964 surveyed the underpants of 940 men from his county, and found faecal contamination in nearly all of them ranging from “frank massive faeces” to “wasp-coloured stains.” The other reason is simple common sense. Toilet paper does not clean. How can it? We wouldn’t rub ourselves with a towel and assume we were clean. A towel would never replace a shower. The toilet paper world is actually using the least effective hygiene to clean the dirtiest part of the body.

I’m often asked how my own behaviour has changed since I’ve done the book. Three things mainly: I always put the toilet seat lid down now that I’ve understood that the flush sprays tiny particles of whatever is in the bowl around the room. I wash my hands better. And I find toilet paper rather gross and inadequate. That’s why I intend to install bidets in my new house, and it’s why I intend to buy, now that I am in the US, a country that sells them, a TOTO travel washlet. That’s a practical but expensive solution to the grave shortcomings of toilet paper. American-born Muslims have better ones. In an exhibit called Lota Stories, they contributed their experiences of trying to wash themselves - a “lota” is a cup used to hold water for cleansing in the anal-washing world - in a paper culture. One contributor had some good advice for subterfuge. When you fill a cup of water at the sink, a beige or black cup will draw less attention. In a shared house, keep a plant in the bathroom to explain away the watering can.

Like the person who wrote that, I am flummoxed by the toilet paper world’s hostility to the concept of washing. 90% of French houses used to have a bidet and now it’s about 10%. A French friend who has bought an apartment which had a bidet asked me very seriously what the point of it was, and then removed it, because she was unconvinced. In the US, TOTO’s attempts to promote bottom-washing - with an expensive “Clean is Happy” campaign - have so far not convinced the vast majority of Americans. It’s weird. But I know one thing: I will henceforth touch as few things on buses and trains as possible.

Then, on a local news programme, an interesting scheme to cool down the Tube, where temperatures even in an English summer can reach over 40 degrees (whereas the maximum temperature to transport animals is 25 or so). The presenter, introducing the cool and cooling scheme of a London professor, said, “it uses a free resource,” before showing a river that is now running under a bit of Victoria station, and doing a grand job of cooling it.

Both these comments had in common the fact that they assumed that things should be free whereas I think they should be paid for. Or at least, it’s not the end of the world, in a rich economy like ours, to be charged for the expensive - and energy intensive/wasteful - commodity that is water. Water is only free if you catch it as rain. Everything else has to be stored and treated. It costs money. As for toilets, it would be nice if they were all free, but I’d rather pay 20 pence to use one, thus boosting the council’s budget, than be confronted with yet another closed public toilet.

Rant over.