I FIRST VISITED Turkey in the early 1960s. It was then that our family first came across squatting toilets. For want of a better name, we called these hole in the floor lavatories ‘Turkish loos’.

Today, in April 2024, we landed at Istanbul’s vast new airport. As nature was calling, I visited one of the many toilets in the airport building. You can imagine my surprise and satisfaction when I saw on the door to a cubicle containing a squatting toilet a sign that read in Turkish “Alaturka tuvalet”, and beneath it, the English words “Squat toilet”. So, it seems that we were right to christen these types of toilets ‘Turkish loos’.