Interesting Facts

According to consumer watchdog Which?, loo rolls in the UK have shrunk in size. (The best selling brand Andrex has reduced the size of its Classic White by 8% (from 240 to 221 sheets per roll), but of course prices have remained the same. If they keep going, they'll just be selling the cardboard roll.)

Residents in Kensington and Chelsea, London are too posh for toilet paper and so they are using wet wipes instead. (Unfortunately this is putting a strain on London's aging drains, and leading to a £12 million annual bill to unblock the sewers. Eew! Sorry about that one.)

Wikimedia Commons image by  Tristanb 27,000 trees have to be felled to provide the world with just one day of loo roll. (Demand for toilet paper is increasing and Britain is the biggest consumer of toilet roll in Europe. I don't know what the answer is.  In my defense I use recycled toilet paper, but I can't imagine a life without it all together. Flannels, washing with water - the idea freaks me out. When I'm travelling I keep some tissues on me at all times.)

Coca-Cola is the most popular grocery product in the UK. (  It tops t he UK's list of top 10 grocery brands w ith sales of £1,014m, up £74.3m on 2011.  The next most popular brands were Warburtons, Walkers Crisps, Cadbury Dairy Milk, Hovis, Kingsmill, Nescafé, Lucozade, Andrex and for the first time Pepsi.  So, soft drinks, crisps, chocolate, coffee, bread and toilet paper.  No wonder we are topping the obesity tables in Europe. )

The famous puppy from the Andrex TV adverts has been replaced by a computer-generated dog. (So, all you people following him on Twitter or Facebook - IT'S NOT REAL!)

The Andrex puppy has over 171,000 friends on Facebook. (This is twice as many as the Lord Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.  What makes it funny, is that the Andrex puppy is a Labrador Retriever puppy that appears on TV adverts for Andrex toilet paper.)

Since July 2010 it has been illegal in France to wipe your bottom with the French flag. (Why on earth would anyone think they need a law for that, I thought? So I Googled it cautiously and found this story Photograph sparks outrage !)

The European Patent Office has 5,841 inventions related to toilet paper. (It probably even has loo paper for left handed people.  Now there's an idea!)

In the US in 1973 there was a massive shortage of toilet paper. (Seemingly, Tonight Show host Johnny Carson joked that there was an acute shortage of loo paper, and so the next morning, 20 million people bought all that they could find. By noon, most stores were sold out.  The shortage lasted for 3 weeks.) Source: Wikipedia

Toilet paper is the third biggest selling household commodity, with sales exceeding £11bn a year. (That's a lot of loo roll. For posh people 'loo roll' = 'toilet tissue')

Toilet paper was invented in 1857. (I wonder what they used before that?)