The Casamento boys of Clarke Street Northcote were raised with a urinal in their bathroom.

There are six of them in total — Damian, Paul, Gerard, Michael, Andrew, and Simon. Throw in Mr Casamento and that meant seven males packed into a three bedroom, single-bathroom bungalow. According to son Andrew, ‘In the end, Mum simply gave up. Gave up trying for a daughter. Gave up hoping that the toilet seat would ever be in the position or the state she wanted it to be in.’

The legend of the Casamento urinal carries considerable weight in the local area. I was recently at a fortieth birthday with Andrew, aka Dr Cass, and met a woman who was squinting at him, attempting to place him.

‘Is that one of the Casamento boys?’ she asked.

‘Yes. It’s Andrew,’ I replied.

“Wow, it’s been a long time. I grew up across the road.’

‘Really, I’m quite a good friend of his.’

‘Really? I don’t suppose you could clear this up. I’ve heard their house has a urinal in it.’

The legend is so huge that the little knee-high commode was always going to struggle to live up to the hype. My own mental image had been a metal wall and grate, something similar to what I experienced under the Robert Heatley Stand at Princes Park, with all six Casamento boys letting fly at once.

‘Two at a time wasn’t unheard of, sometimes three.’ Andrew says. ‘But no, never six. The real risk was when someone would join in from the hallway. It could mean evasive action.’

I also imagined urinal cakes. On this front, there was good news. ‘Definitely,’ Andrew reported. ‘We had the old style yellow beads. Of course. To keep it smelling good.’

Recently, the Guardian ruminated on why it was that we don’t use urinals in the home. The anawer is that we do — the Casamentos do.

The other thing the Casamentos do well is commit to a photo pose …