The Great British Toilet

I've been living in the UK for many years now, but certain things you never quite get used to. The design of bathrooms is one of them. For the love of Christ, who's idea was it to have bog doors swing inwards? Just picture it - you're desperate to go, having just come off your plane, so you rush to the toilet cubicle - all 1 square metre of it. You have your bag in one hand. You push the door open, and it crashes into the seat. You have to squeeze in through a gap that's about 9 inches wide, and then do the tip-toe dance around, desperately trying to get the door shut again. After mission completed, it's back to more of the same. Now, the puzzling bit is - why? The problem must be obvious to anyone who's ever been to the toilet, and the solution bleedingly obvious - so why do toilet doors still swing inwards? Anyway - you managed to get out. Now wash your hands. You have two taps - ice cold, and scalding hot. The rest of the world cottoned on to mixer taps a generation ago, but here they are only just creeping into the consciousness. In the home, the height of fashion is to have a luscious wall to wall carpet fitted in the bathroom. Let me repeat that: Carpet. In. The bathroom. In households that contains men. Moving on to the toilet itself - one would think it's a solved problem by now. In the rest of the western world, it is. In Sweden they usually come with two flush buttons, one for big jobs, and one for little jobs. They use very little water, and just work, quietly and efficiently. Here it is so different. The most common model has a sort of lever that you need to push down hard in a pivoting kind of action. This mechanism just about never works. You push down hard, and get rewarded by a slight gurgling noise, but no water. You wait for the lever to slowly return to its starting position, and try again. The same result. After pumping the lever half a dozen times, if you're lucky, the contraption will sort of flush - a long-lasting trickle consuming lots of water, yet strangely inefficient in terms of the job it was designed to do.