text: Our daughter lives in the toilet, it is not of our choosing, but it is there that she resides, she can often be seen peeping out of the basin wanting to say hello, we leave the toilet door open so we can say hello too. Firstly let me say we do not use the toilet, not since she has taken up residence, oh no, we haven’t used the toilet in years. We know that she uses it as we hear it flushing in the night, but for me and my wife we have to go in a bucket and pour it down the sink, for the more “demanding” toilet breaks we go to our neighbours, they are quite understandable as they have a boy who lives in a bin. We have tried to get her out, pull her out, tug her out, even called the fire brigade, but it is not that she can’t get out, she just doesn’t want to. If we force her out, the moment our back is turned she goes back in. We have asked her why she likes the toilet so much, and she says it’s like having a miniature swimming pool in the house. I tell her that even if we had a swimming pool in the house we would still sleep on a normal bed. She laughs and says “Daddy you are funny”, I didn’t laugh, didn’t see what was funny. She used to leave the toilet sometime, for example when she had to go to school, but when the teachers complained that she spent her entire lunch breaks in the school lavatories we thought it best to home school her, at least our toilet can be kept reasonably clean. As she grew older we hoped that it would grow out of her, but it did not, she wanted her privacy as she aged so we put a lock on the toilet seat (on the inside of course) and put a little door bell by the side. Not sure the need in this, as the toilet seat was quite easy to knock on, but the wife thought it was best. Our daughter was always home, but I can understand the decency in knocking first, how rude just to walk in uninvited, she might have been “on” the loo or anything. Her independence got so bad that we had to register the toilet as a separate home, Flat 2 she called it, Flat 2. I did laugh at that reference, but wouldn’t Flat 1 have been just as funny. My wife says no, 2’s are funnier than 1’s. Then the fateful day came when the postman had a special delivery for “Flat 2” so we let him in to our house, he went upstairs and into the bathroom, rang on the doorbell and waited for our daughter to answer. She had been washing her hair, so took a little time to get to the door. The postman rang again, she finally answered. “Sorry to disturb you” he said “I have a package for you to sign, but do you mind if I quickly use your toilet?”. Well we always brought our daughter up to be polite so what could she do other than say “Yes of course”. So with trousers down and with both of them holding their packages, the toilet was... how shall we phrase this... hmm. Used. It wouldn’t have been a problem, of course our daughter blushed bright red at seeing what she saw, anyone would have, no the blushing wasn’t the problem, the flushing was the problem. The postman didn’t know, and she didn’t say, he pulled the flusher and flushed her down the toilet. We never saw her again. Now I know I said above that we always heard her flushing the toilet, but she always flushed when she was sitting on the toilet, not when she was inside. The postman told us later (when the shock had worn off) that she swirled around like a whirlpool, her hair spinning like wet candyfloss, and then she was gone. We tried to find her of course, but how can you really find someone that was flushed down the toilet.