On the advice of a friend, I have been online and bought a disabled toilet key - see https://shop.disabilityrightsuk.org/products/radar-key - so that I can use one of those locked toilets for disabled people.
I am not of course officially disabled. The aches and pains of my advancing years don't really count. Nor does my bad right knee, especially on a good day. But more than once I've wished that I could get into a disabled toilet when ordinary ones have been shut, usually in the evenings, or perhaps all day in winter. Of course, large supermarkets have toilets, but it feels wrong to pop in and out without buying anything. And you definitely shouldn't misuse a pub or hotel like that. But surely even cash-strapped councils, who close ordinary public toilets in the winter if they can, keep locked toilets available for disabled folk who need to go. You just need a key to get in.
Obviously, using a disabled toilet is a way of jumping any queue outside an ordinary public loo. Even so, I'd have no qualms about doing that if my need were pressing. But in principle my new key will be an emergency standby, not to be routinely or frivolously used, and I must be sure that I don't keep a properly-disabled person waiting outside while I'm doing my stuff inside. Although, as they say, not every disability shows. Maybe that's a line I can trot out if I emerge and encounter somebody in a wheelchair who has got soaked in the rain. Maybe I'd better carry my stick around more often, to suggest a degree of impairment. I imagine that truly disabled persons get very annoyed if their special facilities are usurped by sprightly types who could easily go somewhere else.
The key itself looks like this:
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