Dirty Scrubbers

The thing that’s really pissing me off this week is old people’s hygiene and washing up standards in particular. Remember the debacle last autumn with Stannah Stair, my father-in-law, falling bonce-first down the dancers? You know...that trip to the fragrant Vale of Croydon, where I got dysentery in return for daughter-in-lawly concern? Well, Stannah is still alive and he has been allowed to resume washing up. It’s just not fucking funny.

I have always known that old people can’t wash up. My mother seems to store lumps of gravy in the crevices of pretty much every receptacle in the house. She’s probably got Bisto-chunks lurking in her vest drawer, like meaty dangleberries she can savour secretly when Countdown is on. There is always a new variety of cheese in the dimples of her milk jug and handy egg chunks, clinging to the tines of forks: snack-barnacles for the terminally dirty and desperate. Laughably, my mother complains that my sofa smells of piss, because we haven’t had it recovered since the kids were potty trained. But Jesus could have used the baked bean souvenirs on her plates to feed the five thousand. This is mainly because my mother buys her washing up liquid in a large 5L container from somewhere like Billy's Bargain Busters. She also has shocking eyesight.

Washing up liquid does not come from a yak's fangita, OK?

Now, it dawns on me that there’s a recurring theme here. My mother-in-law, also mature in years, also uses Poundlessland yakpiss to wash up with. You have to use a cupful to get any froth at all. Worse still – and here’s the poke in the tiddies that gets me every time – she uses a brush. Who washes up with a brush? All she’s doing is scratching the dried on food a bit and then putting the plates and cups away. But the father-in-law really is the biggest offender. Reach for something to pour juice into for your child and you’re treated to a glass with week-old milk clinging to the inside, with lip gank plastered round the top and a nice greasy thumb print. Often there are bits of orange flesh from juice “with bits” welded to the foetid milk too. Tell me if I’m out line, but I don’t relish having my son wrap his childish chops around octogenarian gob-slobber in a bid to drink the strange orange cheese concoction. It just ain’t right. And are those glasses really just “discolouring with age”, or is it that they too are caked in two years’ worth of second hand mouth-ming and congealed red wine? Ooh, what a fucking surprise it was, when the discoloured, ageing glasses came up sparkling clean after a proper soak in hot water and scour with a genuine washy-up sponge! 

Use a brush and you might as well give your pots a wipe with your dentures....

And then, in my mind’s eye, I take a walk into the utility room and see the raw meat joint that has been left unrefrigerated on a sunny window sill for at least an entire day and night, ready for dinner time...right next to the lovely dairy based desert, happily fermenting in its anchovy egg barf-festooned dish. The 5/2 fasting diet has got nothing on this. Wanna shit your extra kilos off in a weekend? Go for lunch at an elderly relative’s house!

Don't leave old bloke mouth-ming on cups, thinking you can sneak in a snog by proxy with house guests this way.

Karmic Dysentery

Okay, okay. I realise I haven’t blogged since the summer. I’ve suffered guilty guilt at the thought of leaving you without recreational swearing or entertaining facts about piles for months. My excuse is that I was writing a crime thriller and a series of books for small children AND doing a rewrite on a kids’ novel that went exactly nowhere. The stuff that makes money has to come first, right? Those anoraks and big knickers don’t buy themselves.

So what has been on my mind lately? I’ll tell you what...Karma. That stupid fucking idea that if you’re a good person, good things will happen to you, and if you’re a bastard, your bumhole will knit together, causing you to asphyxiate slowly on your own acrid guff. 

The optimist in me thought this might work...

Being a naive knob-cobbler, I have always thought that if I give to charity – hell, I worked for charities for about 20 years – nice things will come my way. I thought my karma account was in the black and I could expect great health, multiple book deals and thin knees to come my way. What did I get instead? Varicose veins, literary obscurity and dysentery. Yeah, you heard me right. Dysentery.

In October, my Father-in-Law, always the keen climber of stairs in the dark, managed to climb the stairs in the dark...and fall headlong back down to the bottom, because he’s a doddery old fart – more Stannah Stair than Fred Astaire. He broke his head. Well, actually, that’s a fib. He broke 3 vertebrae in his neck and painted the walls with the inside of his head but mercifully, the head wound was superficial and the neck will mend. 

Muggins – Karma Queen, here – plus family went trekking down to the fragrant vale of Croydon to visit Stannah Stair in hospital. He was wearing his new traction ensemble, complete with a Tena pad on his head and support stockings. Notwithstanding my sock-envy, I was glad to see him alive. And I was certain I had earned 50 billion karma points for dropping everything to do a 300 mile round trip to show support  (I would have done it, even without the karma points, because I’m not a complete cow). 

Remember, Father-in-law: Stannah Stair, not Fred Astaire!

But no! What happened? We took my Mother-in-Law out for lunch to a local restaurant to cheer her up.  Within a few hours, I felt like I had been poisoned with potassium or polyester or plutonium or whatever it is that old Eastern Bloc spies spike your butties with.  Then I turned into an intestinal jet wash. 

Dysentery, to the unacquainted, is an affliction - the kind suffered by actors in Bridge on the River Kwai and Tenko - whereby everything on the inside apart from your bones makes a very fast getaway through your arse. I survived on diarolyte alone for a full week. I went through my entire range of Primark winceyette pyjamas.

This was my karmic payback for caring. And, as soon as I was up and about again, we all came down with flu. Then my child’s drum teacher got the hump and sacked me off for poor attendance. 

So now, I’ve decided that being a nice person is seriously overrated. I am going to hone my skills at being an obnoxious fat-kneed turd and we’ll see if that doesn’t turn me into an overnight success. I’ll let you know how I get on. In the meantime, I’m off to mug a student for his Children In Need collecting tin...

Warning: belief in Karma can cause terminal disappointment and bad wind.