Column Eight
THE Government it seems has forbidden the squatter people of Sam Tseng to go to the toilet.
In another clean-up campaign, the equivalent of taking a powder puff to a coal miner, the authorities have declared an area around Sam Tseng, taking in improbable places like parts of Tsing Yi, as somewhere that will have clean water - as well as dirt-free fingernails and clean bed sheets.
Unfortunately for these new squatter huts of chic ethnic 60s tin which came already marbled and ''distressed'', went in for period drainage, which means no drainage at all. The result is that, while our morning product is received by a bowl of industrialporcelain, makes the passing acquaintance of a drop of Dettol and goes thundering into the Harbour with official approval, the squatters' droppings go sort of plop into the open air and find their own way in the world.
There is no place in the new order of things for the rumblings of yesterday's squatter meals to go tobogganing down the hillsides to the sea and become one with the little fishes. The squatters, I read, cannot ''go'' either, at least, not at home.
''It is a region of terror we are seeing here now,'' said Sham Tseng Loo Liberation League leaders, Ah Wan and Ah Tu. ''The bladder control agonies being suffered by the new Crown Princess of Japan, are nothing compared to our miseries. We have to hold it every day at both ends until night time.
''Sometimes women make a break for the bushes with their little ones, only to be cut down in a hail of USD summonses. At night, helicopters with lights hover outside our windows making sure that we are all watching the TV together and that nobody has slipped out back during a pop video filler. Have you ever sat through all or one of those things - a whole three or four minutes of Phil Collins? It is enough to make you go, just thinking about it''.
Ah Wan and Ah Tu shifted uneasily. ''Oh god, that's done it. We are going to have to move faster than a chillied bowel. This means a bus ride to Tsuen Wan.'' The squatters are allowed - indeed encouraged - to use public toilets. The impact of thousands of extra users on a few small mired and muddied utilities cleaned on high days and holy days by USD Expeditionary Forces sears the imagination more strongly than a crate of slashed durians.
''The social impact of the change of useage will have profound effect,'' says Doctor Arnold Turl, Reader in Lavatorial Studies and Ceramic Tiles at the University of The Closed Zone. ''The authorities must realise that public toilets are built for the casual, desperate user in a state of extremis and far from home. Nothing else could induce them in.
''Now they are proposing that public toilets be designated for the regular user and become the focus of people's lives. Incidents of squatters actually setting up camp around the facilities are being reported from Sam Tseng. Campers are saying that by the time they have been and get back home they want to come back again.
''There have been incidents in the long queues for closets just as ugly as those in queues for water stand pipes in droughts or karaoke microphones in Kowloon.
I have never quite understood the alarm of mixing purely natural waste with nature. The only people who get unduly excited about it are recreational swimmers who find themselves bobbing around with a day of meals already thoroughly enjoyed by someone else. There, the objections can be only aesthetic.
Nobody, of course, needs reminding of the outdoor duck restaurants. They are a tourist attraction which the Government must surely protect. Yet, has one never wondered about that rich, near nutty texture of the meat? The restaurateurs talk of secret processes. One of them is to send the little quakers up for a last waddle to the squatter huts.
