Wash, dry, repeat...

I’m taking the liberty of composing a blog post today about something that affects us all.  Personal hygiene.  And bottomly stink.  Over the past month, I have suffered all kinds of bum-flavoured intimate guff, none of which was mine.  It’s now time to share...

The most up-to-date vulvular violation happened earlier today, when I met a friend in a cafe in Chorley and used the cafe’s toilet.  I stared down at the toilet seat and there it was, grinning back at me: someone’s secret smile; a labia lithograph, etched on the plastic like sinister photocopied genitals.  Except there was no photocopier involved and the ink was actual fanny batter.  Yes, I’m taking about the beastly phenomenon of a fangita print on the toilet seat.  Eeuw.  To make matters worse, the mean age in the cafe was about 82.

I know you’re weeping with sympathy for me here, but it is not the first time I have experienced this.  My former place of employment specialised in hoopla, goolie and bum prints on the one toilet that was shared by about fifty people.  Not to mention, the occasional turd dressing with a side-order of wee.  

Several questions spring to mind here. 

A: how can people’s eye/arse co-ordination be so bad that they can’t manoeuvre themselves accurately onto a seat that is designed to allow the bottom bits to hover comfortably over a hole, without hitting the seat?  

B: What have the people done to have dangleage so dirty, that they leave a greasy mark? 

C:  How can they stand up and walk away from arse inspired toilet-seat-decoration that is as eyecatching and distinctive and NOTICEABLE as Warhol’s tins of Campbell’s soup? 

See, the Japanese have got it spot on.

Wipe the fucking toilet seat if you can’t be bothered to wash your genitals, people!  And don’t piss all over the seat and leave it!  You’re not a cat and it isn’t a litter tray.

 

For defacating-age adults

Only the other week, on holiday, I visited the swimming pool toilet after a very expensively groomed and bikini clad older woman came out of the cubicle, having dropped her intestines and a guff bomb that would take out Rochdale.  She never warned me.  I nearly choked to death.  Could she not have said in a range of languages, “Give it five minutes.”?  If I were teaching languages in school, this would be one of the first things I would teach children.

My other gripe is personal stink.  If I, sitting next to you, can smell your intimate savoury twang, why can’t you?  Everyone has occasion to go to the toilet and think, fuck, I’m a bit ripe.  Time for a go on the bidet.  Even the girl in Homeland wipes her kebab with a soapy flannel when she has to go to a meeting but hasn’t had time to shower.  That Billingsgate/chocolatey tagnuts smell, people, is a prompt to get out the soap and water BEFORE people sitting near you start to smell you through your jeans.  Same goes for armpits.  Nobody needs to choke on oniony ones.  Get 'em washed.

There is a school of thought that says human intimate smells are natural and full of pheromones and arouse the interest of the opposite sex, even while driving a Fiat Multipla, wearing orange polyester.  But I say, we’ve come further than that.  Let Vivienne Westwood put fanny batter in her perfume.  I don’t need to pay £50 for a bottle of Eau de Boeuf.  And neither should you!

I agree in principle, but men aren't always the culprits.

Head Lice Suck

OK, so what did I say the other week?  I said my fragrant offspring don’t have nits, didn’t I?  I BOASTED this.  In my blog.  In public.  Like the stupid, smug cow that I am.  And all the while, in a bid to make mummy look a numptee and a liar, my boy child was hatching an army of head lice from infinitesimally small eggs in secret.  The DIRTY...LITTLE...BUGGER.  Suddenly I find I am hostess to new family pets that I am inadvertently feeding and housing using my child’s and my own head.  Eeuw.  

Small boy-child cultivated a lot of these bastards.  He has a very hairy head.  Plenty of room at the inn.  Then, because children are loving and giving, he donated three of the crawly little fuckers exclusively to me.  Thanks, Nitty Norman.  Your Horrormoanal 40 year old mother has inadvertently taken three head lice on a free holiday to the other side of the world.  I don’t know if I should be angry that I have been infested or pleased that I got three extra passengers to go on an all inclusive holiday for nowt.  Mind you, they didn’t eat or drink much apart from my blood but they did get to go swimming every day and dance to Kool n The Gang at the hotel disco.

Perhaps some of you reading this will have been through Nit-gate yourselves, but I’ll guess you’ve never had to cope with this affliction while simultaneously having a rampaging kidney infection.  It was my weekus horribilis.  I, ill person with failing vital organs and alcohol withdrawal symptoms, had to bend over (ouch) to delouse an unwilling six year old, who HATES having his barnet interfered with at the best of times.  For an hour and a half I tried to sort through his long and lustrous locks and pick the eggs out by hand because the tines on my nit comb were too far apart to pick up the grotty appendages with combing alone.  He cried and struggled.  I gave him the finger when he wasn’t looking because I felt bad about telling him to fuck off and sit still but I still really wanted to.  I was ANGRY.  Mainly at the lice for infesting my furry baby child.  How DARE they?  But also at the boy for bringing this shit into my nice clean house when I’d warned him not to rub heads with other children at school.  Why does being a boy have to be a contact sport?

We bought Hedrin and did the greasy overnight thing.  I nitcombed the rest of us with the rubbish comb.  Where the comb failed, my eyes, which work with the help of strong spectacles, told me who was OK and who wasn’t.  Fortunately, my daughter, who is like cousin It from the Addams Family, and my husband, who nowadays has only slightly more hair on his head than on his knackers, were both nit free.  I trusted my judgement.  Dismayed, I knew the small boy still had eggs that I couldn’t get to with my fat fingers and I knew, having had 3 live lice, that I probably still had nits.  But I had to rely on my husband to nit comb my very curly, lacklustre locks.  He is not a very fastidious man.  When he said I was in the clear, I knew he was talking shit - like when I ask him, “have you emptied the kitchen bin?” and he says, “It doesn’t need it,” and all he has done is squash the contents of the very overloaded bin right down so there’s a free inch left on top.

It'd better bloody work for a tenner!

Just when I thought we were all doomed to permanent infestation like a cheap B&B in Blackpool, a friend recommended the Nitty Gritty Nit Free comb.  Now, let’s get one thing straight.  This isn’t a sponsored blogpost.  If I say something’s good, it’s because I think it is good.  The Nitty Gritty was the only thing to pick the tiny eggs out of our hair.  It cost over a tenner at Boots but it was worth it because now I think I can get on top of this embarrassing affliction, which is surely worse than the time I got scabies from falling down a pothole in East Anglia.

So if you find yourself scratching like a stag party in Amsterdam, you know what to do now, don’t you?   Don’t say the Horrormoanal Woman doesn’t do you any favours!

Frankly Mr. Shankly

Nitrofartypantidril.  Yes, I’m knocking back anti-biotics that turn your wee green.  Jealous?  Think I’m cool?  Wish you could score some of these yourself?  Well, their street value is higher than a cheese and onion pasty or a chunky KitKat but I was prepared to dig deep for these babies.  I paid my vial of cloudy wee up front and I’ll pay the balance of tripe tongue on completion without batting an eyelid.  This is 40^th birthday PARTY TIME!

Almost immediately after the Great North Run, my body had started to protest with a bout of hurty wee.  You know the kind?  The stuff that feels like someone has shoved a bottle brush up your flue and given it a good scrape.  That kind.  But I downed the usual foul-tasting crap in sachets, chugged a few gateway anti-bs and put it down to dehydration.  I had a holiday in a far flung destination planned.  All four of us were going on Emirates like posh people to a place with real sun, no pensioners called Elsie and Bill, reeking of stale whisky breath and Bensons at 8am, and no syringes or poo in the sea!  Not Salford Airlines for us.  No Siree.  We were going far far away to celebrate my initiation into the realm of the wise - my 40^th birthday – and I wasn’t going to let a piffling UTI get in my way.  

So I got on the plane with throbbing kidneys and a week’s worth of Trianythingonceoprim to see me through.  I was uncomfortable but not uncomfortable enough to reject my in-flight meal.  I was supposed to avoid alcohol but sometimes, alcohol is just unavoidable.  Yes, perhaps that gin and tonic really would numb the feeling that I had been kicked in the back by a donkey.  And who could resist that spicy curry, so elegantly packaged in plastic and tin foil...?

By the time we got where we were going, I had sat for almost 24 hours like a banana in various vehicles.  I hadn’t slept.  My breath smelled of dog fart and my kidneys were tap-dancing along my back in hobnail boots.  I was sure I was going to die melodramatically in Morrissey style, speaking Frankly, Mr. Shankly in flippant Mancunian iambic pentameter about never quite having been creatively fulfilled in life.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ownZDWNIRs

Me in the sea: Bikini from Asda, body from Lidl

Incredibly though, things improved.  The holiday passed in a state of deep pleasantness, except for that time we went kayaking and got swept out to sea on a riptide and had to be towed back by motorboat...oh and that time the fusty older childless people got annoyed that our kids and another couple’s kid were screaming and shouting and running riot, happy-slapping all the genteel elderly French guests and nicking their false teeth.  Even my kidneys seemed to be on the mend.  I, horrible Queen of Moan, was enjoying myself.  I didn’t even get diarrhoea.

So I thought it was prudent to test out my newly recovered vital organs with some booze.  I drank a full bottle of wine in the space of two hours IN THE AFTERNOON with a new bride from Banbury who knew one end of a sauvignon blanc from the other.  I dumped the kids on my husband and talked crap loudly enough to make people clutch their bags to their breasts and move further away from me.  It seemed like the decent thing to do.  This was, after all, my 40^th celebration.  Big mistake.

Vertigo, hangover, renewed kidney infection, loudly ticking landmine inside the head.  This was the price I paid for my misdemeanour.  This is what happens when you try to do youthful, silly, fun things to an ageing body.  Even the comedy flight home, where we shared a plane with many hundreds of squabbling pensioners going to Mecca (and given that there were no rollers or fluffy slippers, I was fairly sure they weren’t off to the bingo), was not enough to talk my body into behaving and making nice for my 40th.

So I’m back now and my whole big day has been overshadowed by knackered organs, almost certainly caused by the Great North Run, which I pushed myself to do, despite injury, because I didn’t want to let Cancer Research down.  The tragedy of making yourself ill in a bid to make others better is something even Shakespeare didn’t dream up (well, he might have done but I was busy scratching The Cramps on my desk with a compass when they were teaching us that sort of stuff at school).  Karmicly, this is a sum that doesn’t add up and I’m praying the nitrofartypantidril does the trick.  The next step, if this infection doesn’t shift, is to scan my kidneys.  Not good.  This horrormoanal woman is panicking. 

So, until I’ve finished my course of disembowling tablets and I know what’s what, the immortal words of that old whingebag, Morrissey waft around my head.

“Frankly Mr. Shankly, I’m a sickening wreck,

I’ve got the 21^st Century breathing down my neck,

I must move fast, you understand me,

I want to go down in celluloid history, Mr. Shankly.”

Except in my case, it’s literary history.  Even Shakespeare never got it that on the nail, proving that it takes a Mancunian from the land of perpetual rain to moan with real aplomb.