Originally published in The Clifton Courier, August 16, 2017

The other night I shamed myself.

Now, before you get carried away, I didn’t vomit into a sink, swear obnoxiously into a microphone of a bowls club karaoke night or beg for someone’s socks to cushion my aching feet (all other stories for other times).

In fact, for most of the night I was a model citizen.

But as I was walking home, I did a dishonourable thing. I used a pub purely for its restroom facilities and didn’t spend a cent.

You see, I had consumed a fair amount of liquid that evening and needed to use a ladies room. I was travelling solo, I wasn’t about to order a plate of ribs and tuck in alone.

So I walked into the establishment with a plan. My gaze was alternating between scanning the room and frowning at my phone as I mustered up all the acting skills I obtained from Year 10 drama to pretend I was in there to meet a friend.

Having put on the best performance my limited abilities would allow, I waltzed into the ladies room.

On my way out, I did an encore. I did my best to look extremely cross, phone in hand, as if I’d just been ditched.

Look, we’ve all done it from time to time.

We’ve all been en route from one pub to the other and heard the call of nature.

There’s a sense of urgency when you receive that call. You can’t screen it for too long without dire consequences.

Depending on your gender, you may or may not be have done so in shoes of a ludicrously impractical height and a quality so low, you couldn’t guarantee they’d hold together all night. This shortens your strides and makes walking decidedly more jerky, which isn’t good for an impatient bladder. You knew that waiting to your preferred pub wasn’t an option because it would take you that much longer to walk there.

Compound this with the bone-chillingly cruel winds and that unnecessarily slippery fog-meets-drizzle Toowoomba is famous for, and holding on until you reach your desired destination seems impossible.

So maybe you’ve stopped at some old pub half way through your journey to answer that call. You might have stayed for an obligatory beer, but if there were more than three people at the bar to distract the staff and you crept through a side door, you didn’t even bother.

And, depending on how… hydrated you were, you usually felt a pang of guilt as you left. But you still left.

You might have reasoned that it was better than the alternative. You didn’t want to have an accident and then call it a night – that would have meant spending less money in other pubs and bypassing the obligatory hot chips and gravy sesh afterwards. That would have had a negative economic effect on the entire precinct. And even though you never intended to spend your dosh at your toilet pit stop, you told yourself that the flow on effect of you partying on would have benefited the establishment in some way. That’s one way I’ve reasoned it.

But looking back, I should have felt guilty. I didn’t deem the place good enough for me to spend some time and my money, but I was fine with dumping my bodily excrement there. What a jerk.

And I was probably missing out on a good time. The gum-chewing, bleached-rats-tail-footy-haircut-toting gronks I avoided wouldn’t have been there. The dance floor, while non-existent at the time, could have been started easily and had ample room for moving interpretive dance performances. And, let’s be honest, pubs like that always have cheaper drinks. I was the fool.

So next time, I vow to buy a beer at the next pub I empty my bladder in. And if it’s the end of the night and I’m riding solo, I’ll get ribs.

Because having a whole plate of ribs you don’t have to share sounds like a pretty good way to end the night anyhow.