A Year on the Bog

In 2002 while in Japan, Andy McBean set out on a remarkable mission—to record every single visit to the toilet made over a year. Not just the bizarre ones involving attacks with fire extinguishers or suffering from hypothermia, but every single visit. It was a grand vision encompassing not just the minutiae of bowel movements but the broad social sweep of environment and society—the people and the places, the act of getting to and getting from—as he puts it so eloquently in his foreword "the whole flipping rigmarole of toileting." The Japanese experiment ended in disaster—crashing and burning on a cold night in Tokyo—but Andy was undeterred, and when he had recovered sufficiently he took up the challenge again. This is a record of a year in the life of one man. Some say a brave man, some say foolhardy, others call him a halfwit. And through this record the world can share with him his pain, his pleasure; the tears of laughter, the cries of despair—a moving experience like no other.