Dear father Simon and the sympathetic, forgiving collective.

This is a confession which I feel I need to get off my chest as it haunts me every time we go to a well known D.I.Y store. It may have happened 13 years ago, but I still get shivers up my spine whenever we walk near the bathrooms section.

We had recently moved into a lovely house in the area and needed to do a little bit of renovating and painting and generally putting our own mark on the place. I was pregnant with our second child and we had a lively 2 year old, we will call him Dougal - not his real name, as he is now a strapping teenage lad and made me promise not to reveal this – who ideally needed to be toilet trained before the arrival of the baby. This was proving to be rather challenging and we never went out without the change of underwear etc…

One afternoon we took the trip, as undoubtedly thousands of your listeners did yesterday, to our local D.I.Y megastore. On arrival at the store, I asked our son if he needed to visit the toilet, and we duly went to the conveniences there, where not even a trickle was produced. We browsed around the aisles, trying to decide on the colours for our decorating and various wallpapers and paints…sputum green or cigarette-stain yellow, that kind of thing. I was finding it difficult to keep a tight rein on Dougal, who enjoyed running up and down the aisles, whilst debating various colours and colour schemes.

We suddenly heard a wee voice piping up behind us from Dougal - "Mummy, daddy I been a good boy - I went in the big boys toilet!" We both looked down at Dougal thinking well done - but how on earth did he get to the loo and back – have we been that engrossed in choosing paint colours?

Then it dawned on me. We were standing adjacent to the bathroom displays, and asked Dougal to show us where exactly he’d done his business. He promptly led us to the nearest display toilet, lifted the lid, and there was all the evidence we needed - shown off by my very proud Dougal!

Of course we were torn - we had to praise the performance of our little darling but also realised that the display loo, not plumbed in, with its incriminating contents, would soon be discovered. So we did what any responsible parent would do in that situation – we made a hasty retreat and escape the store without saying anything as we were far too embarrassed.

So father Simon, I wish to beg forgiveness from the store staff, who I am sure eventually discovered the little surprise, and to any unsuspecting customers browsing the store, checking out new cisterns and pans whilst we were totally unaware of our little darling performing.

I was reminded of this incident recently when looking round the bathroom displays in a different store and noticed that they now have hard plastic covers over the toilet bowls - to avoid this very kind of incident I suspect!

Emily.