 His girlfriend thought he was crazy.
He couldn’t bring himself to tell his family.
Everyone thought he would fail.
But Andy McBean was undeterred.
After Everest, and the deep chasms of the ocean,
this was perhaps the last great challenge –
and he wasn’t a man to walk away from a challenge…
In 2002 while in Japan, Andy McBean set out on a remarkable adventure. His mission: to record every single visit to the toilet made over a year. Every visit. Not just the bizarre ones involving attacks with fire extinguishers or suffering from hypothermia. Every single visit. It was a grand vision encompassing not just the minutiae of bowel movements but the broad social sweep of environment, society – the people and the places, the act of getting to and getting from – as he puts it so eloquently in his foreword ‘the whole flipping rigmarole of toileting’… The Japanese Experiment ended in disaster, crashing and burning on a cold night in Tokyo. But Andy was undeterred and when he had recovered sufficiently he took up the challenge again.
This is a record of a year in the life of one man. Some say a brave man, some say foolhardy. Others call him a halfwit. And through this record you can share with him his pain, his pleasure; the tears of laughter, the cries of despair. A moving experience like no other.
About the Author: Andy McBean - with one failed attempt behind him (Japan, 2002) this time he was determined to succeed. Such grit and courage in the face of adversity - qualities usually reserved for great global adventurers - have marked Andy out from the common herd. That and the purely bonkers quality of this particular project. Andy McBean - a very special person indeed.
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