The best reader gift Danny Katz ever received was an unusual one

Dear Anonymous and Benevolent Toilet-Seat Angel,

I’ve been meaning to thank you for a long time now, ever since I wrote a column about fancy, expensive, over-designed bathroom-fixtures. It was a brave column, garnering tremendous controversy in the upper echelons of the bathrooming fraternity.

I wrote about fiddly towel racks that can only be secured to the wall with an obscure micro-hex-grub-Allen-key, only three existing in the world. About ultra-posh shower tiles that can’t be exposed to oil, soap, water, or tears of despair.

But mostly I wrote about my over-designed, under-thought toilet – a stylish, sexy one, with a buff Chris Hemsworth cistern-torso and shapely Mad Men-secretary toilet-bowl curves.

The toilet seat had come loose: it was slipping and sliding around every time I sat on it – like doing your business on an air hockey table. So I decided to tighten the seat, but I couldn’t find any seat screws on the top of the seat like you’d find on a normal toilet in a normal universe with normal Newtonian toilet-seat-tightening laws.

The seat screws had been hidden away because people don’t want to buy a toilet any more – they want to buy a seamless sculptural work of lavatory art.

The only way to tighten this toilet seat was to lie on the bathroom floor, reach into the cobwebby gap behind the toilet, poke my hand up a narrow porcelain crevice by dislocating my arm bones, then feel around for a tiny wing nut with the tip of my outstretched finger – and simply tighten the seat like that.

But it was impossible to get any grip on that wing nut – not with a fingernail, not with long-nose pliers, not with telekinesis. So I just learned to live with my Slip n’ Slide toilet-seat, and anytime I had to sit for an extended period of time, I took a Dramamine for motion sickness.

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But toilet-seat angels really do exist, it’s not just a magical childhood myth that our parents told us before bedtime.

Two weeks after writing my column, a package arrived in the mail – an anonymous package addressed to “Mr Katz, Newspaper Columnist”, so I knew it was either a gift from a reader, or anthrax spores.

But the lure of gift-getting was more powerful than the fear of agonising respiratory death. I tore open the wrapping, reached inside, and pulled out… a small metal tube, hammered flat at one end.

Thankfully the gift came with an explanation note, otherwise I might’ve eaten it. The note said “Dear Mr Katz, I had the exact same toilet seat troubles as you. Please find enclosed a tool I invented specifically for this purpose”.

There was no name, no address – so that’s why I’m thanking you now, O Mysterious and Selfless Toilet-Seat Tool-Inventor. Because that tube fitted inside the narrow porcelain crevice. It gripped the unreachable wing nut. It tightened my seat. And my tightened toilet seat has allowed everything else in my life to untighten.

For this, you have my eternal gratitude.

P.S. What have you got for a wonky toilet-roll holder that’s attached to the wall with electrostatic energy? Awaiting a gift.