At some point my series of toilet and urinal images needs to move away from pubs and Thai restaurants. But not tonight.

Here’s the toilet at the Chat Thai restaurant in Campbell Street, Sydney. A great modern Thai eatery, all in yellow and black. Including this Dalek trying to disguise itself with a potted plant.

Continuing my photographic series on Secret Men’s Business, we visit the men’s toilet in the Suan I-San Thai Restaurant in King Street, Newtown.

I’m reliably informed that it’s incredibly inappropriate to hang a temple gong in the bathroom. I doubt that a renaissance painting makes up for that.

This urinal in a suburban office at St Ives is completely different from the boldly-patterned tiles of the Lansdowne Hotel men’s toilet floor. Starkly simple, almost bleak.

And, I should add, slightly claustrophobic.

As I mentioned in the comments, I think I will turn this into an art project. A colleague now works for Flickr and upgraded me to a “pro” account — even though I’ve published only one single image so I could comment on ’Pong’s photos.

To save you looking them up, here are the images on toilets I’ve published so far.

• There’s something about this urinal…
• Unreliable Bangkok 3: Bureaucracy
• Abstracts in the Urinal
• Look, mum, no hands!
• It’s the little details which matter…
• Apple iPhone parodies

Toilets are rarely seen. I think it might be interesting to document them.

For some reason, I love the hexagonal tiles on the floor of the men’s toilet in the Lansdowne Hotel, Chippendale, in Sydney. Could it be because I’m old enough to remember when military simulations were played out on maps with a hexagonal grid?

I’ve mentioned before that our time in Bangkok wasn’t your typical tourist experience. One day, for example, we spent six hours in the Don Mueang district government offices. Here’s a photo of the men’s toilet.

Thailand has a general election on 23 December. It’s important. Well, all elections are important, but this one is the first under the new constitution, and the first since last year’s military coup. ’Pong needed to register to vote from Australia. But there were complications…

• ’Pong’s government ID card expired 5 years ago, but you need an ID card to register to vote.
• Your government ID needs a “home” address in Thailand, but ’Pong doesn’t have one. That meant giving brother Khong’s address.
• When you sign onto a household, the head of the household has to be there in person to counter-sign.

And so, on a sunny Thursday morning, we took the Bangkok Skytrain to its northernmost station, Mo Chit, and then a cab to Don Mueang to meet Khong who, sensibly as it turned out, had taken the entire day off work to deal with this.

The district government offices are a grey marble building at the side of the highway north and, apart from minor Thai design elements, much like government buildings everywhere — apart from being draped in yellow for the King’s Birthday.

Inside, the staff were your typical public servants doing the usual public servant thing: slowly processing paperwork as people waited for their number to be called. With the election fast approaching, they were busy with voter enrolments.

It was quaint to hear the sound of a dot-matrix printer, though, and to watch one chubby girl with glasses, a clerical assistant, dividing up the output from a continuous-feed 132-column line printer. A young child ran from desk to desk — obviously a family-friendly workplace!

We explained our mission, and a further complication was revealed. As ’Pong was moving his registration to a new district, it would have to be processed by the Investigations Officer — a longer queue. And then the Investigations Officer told us it needed to be approved by the district manager, but she was at a meeting. No-one knew when she was due back.

We were advised that we should go and have lunch.

Being Thailand, there were food stalls across the road. We chose the one with the most public servants. I wondered why the walls had photos of old aircraft — Ford Trimotors, DC-3s and so on — as well as a huge model of a Lockheed Tristar. It turns out the head of this family business is a retired aircraft maintenance supervisor from the nearby airport with 40 years service. They’re “his” planes. We exchange aviation gossip.

After lunch, a walk through the suburbs and some high-quality waiting around in the office getting bored, we were finally graced with the presence of the district manager and we soon had the requisite signature (pictured). Just one more short queue for a photo and a new ID card — and paying the crippling 20 baht fine for letting the old card expire (about 70 cents) — ’Pong’s identity was restored.

We caught the train back to central Bangkok. I’ve already posted one photo from that journey, but I’ll have more to say about trains soon.

Why the photo of the toilet? Well, I was the only farang in the entire building, and was already attracting attention. I seem to recall some Australian government travel warning about taking photos in foreign government buildings — and I believe everything our government tells us.

[P.S. I've decided that these memoirs are unreliable not only because I didn't take notes but also because they're failing to appear every day as promised. If this disturbs you, I'll give you your money back.]

This just has to be the classiest allusion to the Coat of Arms of the Commonwealth of Australia ever, no?

This image is printed on the front of the Porsche 2400 Turbo hand dryer, as seen in the men’s toilet at the Cyprus Community Club here in Sydney. And it is truly beautiful, don’t you think?

The kangaroo holding out its paws to dry is such a subtle indication that (a) we’re looking at a hand dryer and (b) it’s made in Australia.

And the emu! Does it feel envious of the roo, unable to present hands at all? Or does it smirk in quiet self-satisfaction, happy in the knowledge that it has feathers?

This cheap but moderately decorative light fitting in an inner-city toilet symbolises the difference between a well-run business and a bad one.

This toilet is in a restaurant — a Thai restaurant on George Street, Sydney, called Crocodile Senior. No website, but great food, fast and efficient service and Thai pop music DVDs on screen. Nicely fitted out too.

Many restaurant toilets seem to come from a forgotten land. Bare bulbs hang from dust-covered fittings. Soiled paper towels overflow the rarely-emptied bin — when towels haven’t run out, that is. There’s a brown stain under every tap — and yes, that is urine you can smell. As you dry your hands on the back of your pants, you wonder where else they’re skimping on the cleanliness.

Did that kitchenhand actually wash his hands after he took a slash?

Green salad, anyone?

You finish your meal. It tasted OK, and next morning you’re moderately certain that your upset stomach is about the eight glasses of red you downed, not the chicken. But Doubt niggles at the back of your mind, and that restaurant drops silently off your list.

Crocodile Senior’s toilet, on the other hand, is fresh and clean. The flowers are artificial, but their colours are bright and there’s no layer of dust. This cheap light fitting creates a little bit of sparkle that helps convey the message: this is a nice place to be.

So many businesses seem to be like the Toilets from a Forgotten Land.

Some businesses piss away three days deciding the colour of the stationery, and $200k fitting out the spectacularly fashionable foyer. The salesman — sorry, “Business Development Manager” — has a PowerPoint presentation with 3D animation and sound effects. But the back office staff struggle because the computers are riddled with spyware and no-one’s paying attention. The driver reckons the truck really should be serviced, but nothing gets done and of course it breaks down the very day of The Important Delivery.

It’s like the slum-lord’s apartment, where wallpaper literally papers over the structural cracks. It’s the aged whore, well past her use-by date, whose sedimentary layers of pancake make-up distract you from the fissures and pustules beneath.

Sooner or later, there’s going to be leakage. And it won’t be pretty.

Even if it’s your local pub, there’s a limit to the kind of photographs you can take in the urinal and still use the excuse that it’s for “Art”.