Let me do you a list. The one across from my flat. The one at the end of the street where I used to live. The one near my old office. The one on the main road. The one near the park. There’s no question that public toilets have been slowly, then quickly, disappearing and closing down and that it feels like a crisis and something we need to respond to. But how?

The Scottish Lib Dems think the answer is for councils to be given more money to stop the closures and build new facilities. There was also a petition to the Scottish Parliament this year calling for the government to place a statutory duty on councils to provide adequate public toilets because, it said, public toilets are a basic requirement of public health and hygiene and are needed by locals, visitors, delivery drivers, care workers and others.

The reason the subject’s come up again now is the Lib Dems have got their hands on the latest figures on toilets and more importantly the rate of decline and what they show is that it’s bad but worse in some parts of the country than others. Overall, the number of public lavatories in Scotland has decreased by 25% since 2007 from 513 to 387 but in Edinburgh it’s more than halved and four council areas now have no public facilities at all.

The obvious answer is to prevent further closures and start some kind of building programme to provide more toilets, but it’s an answer that’s a little too obvious. The Holyrood petition focused on the Highlands and called for an “adequate” level of service but what is adequate in a place of some 10,000 square miles? Every 100 miles? Every 200? You could build a thousand toilets in the Highlands and it still wouldn’t be “adequate” for the place and time you happen to need one.

It's also worth considering what most public toilets were like when they were more common. I can think of some good examples such as the grand Victorian facilities for gentlemen in Union Terrace Gardens in........

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