You don't want to contemplate the urinal equivalent of 'friendly fire'

Given a choice of five urinals, which would you take? It's a question Marcus Berkmann and his friends have discussed endlessly

Illustration by Ping Zhu

What do men talk about? My female friends often ask me this question, possibly because they don't believe the answers I give. To mention a recent example: one friend has discovered that her man has been serially unfaithful, and as well as everything else, she worries that he will have confided in his male friends and they will all be laughing at her. Absolutely not, say I.

She gives me a long look of disbelief. I think she might be inclined to disbelieve anything any man told her at this moment. No, I explain, men don't do that. I have male friends and I have no idea what they are up to in their private lives. They don't tell me, and I don't ask.

"So what do men talk about?" asks my friend.

The usual things. Sport. The films we have seen. Cars. You wouldn't believe how many men talk about cars. We don't talk about real life: we distract ourselves from real life. The other day we had a long conversation about pub urinals we have known.

"You're having me on."

No, seriously. I was remembering a pub I used to go to regularly in my twenties, wondering if it's still there, hoping they haven't changed it too much. But the urinals, they could certainly have done with an upgrade.

"You're going to tell me about them now, aren't you?"

There were five of them, in a straight line, none appreciably filthier than any other. The smells were those of any 1980s pub urinal: smoke, sweat, beer, defeat and those little blue chemical hygiene-lozenges that sucked all the p**s-pong out of the room, and much of the oxygen with it. Doctors would advise that you spent as little time in such an environment as possible.

So, given a choice of five urinals, which would you take? If we call them A, B, C, D and E, most people's first instinct would be to go for the middle one, C. The thinking is that the next person to come in will go for A or E, and the next after him will go to E or A. So it won't be until the third person comes in that you will have someone peeing next to you. But as we thought about it, we realised that you are better off starting at one of the end points, say E. The next two people will go to C and A, and number three then has a choice between B and D. So you have a 50per cent probability that no one will be peeing next to you until the fourth person comes in. Of course, if you really wanted to avoid human proximity, you could just go in the cubicle, but that would spoil all the fun.

"You discussed this 30 years ago, or last week?" Her eyes are goggling.

We discussed this endlessly 30 years ago, and then a different group of us discussed it last week. And my reminiscences sparked off a whole slew of others. Oddly enough, three of us had vivid memories of the first time we had seen someone peeing at a urinal and texting with the other hand. I remember admiring the dexterity, while fearing the possible consequences. No one's hand is that steady. You don't even want to contemplate the urinal equivalent of "friendly fire"

My friend doesn't know what to make of this, but at least she isn't thinking about her shit of a husband for a few minutes. This is the beauty of male conversation. It's not real life, it's a distraction from real life, just when you need it most.