Whereas in Trouhans, in a scrupulously neat organic cafe run by a prim petite woman, decorated with a touch of chintz, I find a single toilet with a sign above it, kindly requesting that, since this room is for common use, everyone sit down to piss.ĭon’t you sometimes wonder how different the world might look and feel if women were in charge? And then immediately ask yourself what exactly you mean by women, and different, and in charge? A woman was in charge of England in the 16th century at the time of aggressive exploration and trade expansion east and west of this absurdly self-aggrandising little country, seeding the colonialism and slavery that flourished like bindweed under another woman in the 19th century we keep digging and digging but somehow the racism and white supremacy that are the legacy of Queens Elizabeth and Victoria won’t be uprooted. This same open-plan doorless urinal accosts me in town after town I become accustomed to averting my gaze. Seeing a man right there at the urinal makes me jump. In a severe grey-and-black room in Arras, also unisex, the cubicle marked F for femmes is beside the common-use sink which is a few feet away from the urinal which sits in an open corridor beside the cubicle marked H for hommes. In a scruffy room in Reims I stand gazing at the doors of four cubicles, one locked and labelled with a female silhouette, the rest unmarked and empty, wondering how long I’ll have to wait, before sternly reminding myself that this is a unisex room and a toilet is a toilet. I remember this scene when travelling through France in summer 2018, where the architecture of restaurant toilets becomes a source of piquant fascination. What difference does it make who uses it?”

My daughter and aunt go to the toilet at the same time, and as they return to the table, my daughter asks: “Why did you use the men’s toilet?” My aunt, who lives in a suburb of Athens, isn’t on social media, and knows nothing of the argument surrounding gender-neutral toilets, frowns and replies: “It’s a toilet. Each has one of those ersatz Victorian sign plates on its door, depicting, to the left, a besuited man with cane and top hat, and on the right, a woman encased in full skirt with bustle.

The restaurant where I’m having lunch with extended family has dusty green paintwork, tourist-trap tables in a long row outside, and at the back, up a short flight of stairs, on either side of a small landing, two toilets. The time is Easter 2017, the place Nafplio in the Peloponnese, a patterned silk scarf of a seaside town, the kind of place a cruise might pause for a shopping expedition. Trips to the toilet are the stuff of neither postcards home nor poetry but none the less that’s where I’m going to start.

Naomi alderman's the power