2004-12-06 - 2:12 p.m.

If anyone was to buy me a course of hypnotherapy for Christmas, I�d have no hesitation about how to best to use it. If I�m going to have my noggin permanently brain-altered by some watch-swinging crackpot, I wouldn�t go for quitting smoking, curbing drinking or even my addiction to the crapola pinball game that comes with Windows.

No, I would want the mental discipline and mind-over matter skillz to be able to urinate in public.

Of course, I don�t mean having an open-air slash on Oxford Street in the middle of the frenzied shoppers, although as an enterprise, that may well have its own merits (I wonder if the retail-monged hordes would even notice). No, just the simple joy of using a public toilet, without having to go through the months of planning, reconnaissance and emergency measures that it now takes me.

Call me Mr Sensitive No Pee-Pee Nerve-Merchant, but I am insanely jealous of anyone that can just naturally go without ensuring that no proof of human existence can be detected for a four mile radius. Me? I virtually need to be hermetically sealed off and the entire room soundproofed before I can even summon up the liquid necessaries.

The �busy bathroom � full bladder � no cubicle� threeway is my worst nightmare, and has blighted many a night out, with me scampering back and forth for constant updates on the level of bathroom occupation.

Even the cubicles, to which I will readily retreat for even the most perfunctory formalities, are useless if I can hear anyone breathing, clearing their throats or taking Class A narcotics. I really do need some bladder-liberating Jedi mind trick, though Amazon came up short in the related gifts department.

It�s getting to be the same in the cinema � not the inability to take a leak, but being irreversibly disturbed by even the smallest rustling, let alone the dickless sportswear-clad wannabe gangsters who think it�s acceptable to answer phone calls in the middle of a film, possibly my only concession to the capital punishment lobbyists. Someone at the back could whisper to their friend, and my ears instantly prick up, in much the same way as those of a paranoid meerkat that has just got wind of a cheetah�s rumbling stomach several miles away.

As I write, one of the office managers is eating crisps with her mouth open about fifty yards away and I�m finding it hard not to lob my stapler at her window.

I guess what I really need for Christmas is a lead container with its own urinal and 14 foot screen. I wonder if Amazon do THOSE?