Some of the greatest inventions were slow to gain public acceptance, it's true, says Frank McNally. Yet you'd think the world would have made its mind up by now about a device that was first mentioned in French literature some time around 1710. Not so, it seems.
Here we are, almost 300 years on, and the jury is still out on the bidet.
Although the bidet has its enthusiasts - mostly in southern Europe and Latin America - these would still qualify as what marketers call "early adopters". Meanwhile, the nation responsible for the invention remains deeply ambivalent. The French like to have one in the house. But according to normally reliable sources, they never actually use it. As for northern Europeans, they contemplate the bidet, if they contemplate it at all, with something bordering on horror.
I've been contemplating it with more horror than usual of late, having spent a few days in Portugal with, among other people, my two-year-old son. Daniel's vocabulary does not yet stretch to describing the highlights of his holidays. But if it did, I bet the fact that everywhere you go in Portugal has a bidet would have been right up there.
Next to water itself, a bidet must be the most exciting thing in the world to a two-year-old. As parents will know, children discover water at about 18 months - after which, for a short but intense period of their lives and yours, it is a daily battle to separate them from the kitchen sink. The kitchen sink has one big advantage for the parent, however, in that it is not accessible to the infant without a platform. Thus, the sound of a chair being pushed across the kitchen floor acts as an early-warning system for the water police.
Then the toddler goes on holiday to southern Europe and discovers that, for once, some thoughtful person has organised the plumbing with exactly his needs in mind. Nothing says "holiday" to a two-year-old like a kitchen sink, placed at floor level.
Who cares if it's in the bathroom? You didn't even notice the child go in there - you were too busy unpacking bags and checking out the rest of the apartment. Meanwhile, the bathroom's child-friendly sink was communicating with him, saying: "Psst, check me out - and bring something you can fill". Before you knew it, your pride and joy was emerging in triumph with a mug full of water that he had poured himself. And that's when - Arrghhh! - you peered in the door and discovered that the tap in the bum-bath was running.
After an incident like this, it's a relatively minor thing when the child floods the bathroom, as he inevitably will. Flooding the bathroom takes only moments with a bidet. The flow of water is often so designed that when there isn't an, er, large object blocking it from above, it goes everywhere. But as I say, compared with the possibility that your child has consumed some of the water, a few of inches of it on the bathroom floor is nothing.
Of course, you don't need to have a two-year-old in your entourage for bidets to be a problematical concept. Part of the difficulty, historically, is that even people who want to use them for the purposes intended are not sure how. The lack of information on the subject, even today, reflects the fact that it's hard for users to discuss the subject at all without sharing too much. Having said that, I found one on-line discussion among ex-pats in Italy - one of the most pro-bidet countries - that covered the subject as extensively as one would wish (and, indeed, a bit more extensively than that).
There's a hint in the name, as it happens, which is from an old French verb bider, "to trot". Despite what you may think, this has nothing to do with a condition that affects many holiday-makers abroad - it just refers to the necessary similarity between straddling a pony and sitting on a bidet. The big difference is that, depending on circumstances, you're supposed to straddle this particular pony in different directions.
It seems that bidets fall into the category of things that, once you get the habit of using, you can't do without. In Argentina - which is the world bidet leader, with 90 per cent of homes having one - abstention is not an option. In Spain too, committed bidet users regard non-users as hygienically suspect. On the other hand, critics of the habit suggest it is a hangover from an era when daily showering was unknown. And in Ireland, bidets have never quite recovered from their status as favoured accessories of upmarket 1970s bungalows.
The crucial thing for the bidet is the failure of the US to embrace it, so far at least. And it may now be too late. Those geniuses at adaptation, the Japanese, have gone a step further than the bidet by devising a paper-free toilet that flushes, washes, and dries at the touch of a button, or indeed without the touch of a button. Computerised toilet-bidets are becoming the norm in Japan, which probably means we'll have them here soon.
The good news is that two-year-olds won't be able to use them - though they may prove to be beyond a few adults as well.