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.

Walk Away!

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but the point of walking is to get from one place to another without rolling or need of a tarmac-based luge.  I learned to do it 39 years ago and so far, can do it quite well.  I taught my children to do it when they were a little over a year old and they’re pretty shit hot at it too, except the bits where they trip and fall on their heads.  So, given that we’ve pretty much got walking sorted, why does my Mother-in-law insist we do walking whenever we see her?

          

“Let’s go for a walk.  They’re such city children.  They never walk,” she says.

But of course, here’s the lack of logic in her statement.  They do walk.  They don’t roll around on a giant ball like a Dyson hoover made of meat and hair.  And yes, they are city children but living in a city doesn’t preclude ambulatory activity using real feet and knee joints.  We’re not all so chi chi and sophis in Manchester that even nine year olds can boast their own pimped up mobility scooters.

.

Then she says, “We’re on the edge of the countryside here.”

And this is what really made me choke, before I’d even snagged my Pringle jumper on a bramble in the “woods”.  My in-laws live in Croydon.  My Mother-in-law must be wearing cow shit spectacles if she thinks she’s been living on the edge of the countryside in Croydon for over twenty years.  Streatham has some grass but it doesn’t make it the Cotswolds.  There’s a Lido in Tooting but those things floating in the water are balls of snot, chunks of polystyrene and hair, not the Maldives.  Perhaps all these years she has been mistaking the teenagers in the Whitgift Centre for comely Friesian cows.  Maybe she thinks the tram is some Trans-Alpine Express through the bucolic Swiss slopes instead of a piss-flavoured public-carrying slow death bullet, taking in the smells and sounds of New Addington, like a scene out of Deliverance with tattooed white men driving souped-up H-Reg Fiats instead of banjos, coz dey iz well fly, innit, bruv?

           

So we went for a walk.

                

Now, I hate to break it to you, city dwellers, but they have mud instead of tarmac in the twenty square metres of Croydon countryside.  You can’t wear platforms or stilettos or white trainers or brand new school shoes.  And this sadism runs in the family...

My Sister-in-law lives in proper rural Kent and I can report that she is also a keen lover of walkies and they have real mud there.  And cow shit.  Lots of cow and horse and chicken and sheep shit and rabbits that are not stylish jackets but which sit around with myxomatosis, giving you the evil eye.  There’s not a single human turd in sight.  And she likes.  Walking.  In.  The.  Shit.  Not because she’s getting from her house to, say, the shop or the pub, which would be a sensible use of legs.  But because it’s “bracing” and “fun”.  Warning: These are euphemisms for “fucking freezing” and “pointless”.

My Sister-in-law once made me do walking during the Summer because she lives in an “area of outstanding natural beauty”.  Yes, well, there are fields and I can see them from her garden and from the car.  I was wearing white linen trousers and brand new canvas Pumas, for God’s sake!  We got stung by nettles, the linen ended up hemmed in horseshit and my husband fell down a pothole and broke his anus.  This is torture, not hospitality.  We didn’t even take a flask of gin for emergencies.  All wrong.

Having begun this horror story, I’m going to stop here before some of you die of flange-failure.  My point is that walking as a pastime is wrong.  Just utterly fucking pointless.  You get mud all over perfectly good shoes and snag your favourite clothes.  There’s nowhere to go for a wee.  Face it, there’s nowhere to go.  Running is different.  That’s exhilarating and good exercise.  But walking...just save it for the bloody shops, all right?  I iz a city kid, ja’getme?

           

Horrormoanal Twelve Days of Christmas Humbug

On the first day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Some bobbly long johns from Marks and wynciette pyjamas from Primark wot have faded in the wash and lost a button.

On the second day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Some Nectar points for paying the gas bill, a new pack of anusol for the piles and a bic razor for the thorny Kevin Keegan legs.

On the third day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Iboprufen for the back that I pulled out whilst removing a shoe and corsodyl to gargle away a furry tongue.

On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A bottle of Jolt so I can stay awake for ten minutes past water-shed: long enough for a festive fumble.

On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Six mystery dented tins from Asda, a pile of yellow stickered veg and a tub of on-the-cusp-of-going-fizzy yoghurt, hold the fois gras.

On the sixth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A fifteen year old Christmas tree from Woolworths and a load of plastic baubles from Asda that are too shit to fit on the tree properly and spend a fortnight falling off and rolling round the back of the radiator.

On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A failing metabolism that deposits five tonnes of lard on my inner thighs just from looking at Morrisons’ mince pies and a load of ensuing wind that makes me smell of forgotten sprouts.

On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

An argument with my mother about how snotty the veg should be on Christmas Day and how the in-laws’ presents for the kids are WAY shitter than hers.  Aren’t they?  AREN’T THEY?  And when I don’t answer because I wish to be diplomatic, I’m a disloyal bastard, naturally.

On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Some slightly undercooked meat at my in-laws that gives me the trots, some crap Swedish card games that make my brains pickle themselves in their own despair, monster back ache from sleeping in a bed that hasn’t had a new mattress since 1964 and hayfever from sleeping in a room with carpet that has never ever been replaced, since the time when carpets were first woven out of man nasal hair.

On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A pile of Christmas presents that demonstrate clearly that despite my being a tight arse, everyone else has actually spent a lot less on me, three non-matching pillow cases and four hours of competitive old person Scrabble.

On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

Two bickering children, pretending they’re actually wild cats in the back of the car during a five hour journey back up north, scratching each other, dropping crumbs from bad bendy peanut butter sandwiches that have started to smell of plastic bag and a bladder that can’t decide if it does or doesn’t want a wee.

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me,

A load of shitty repeats on telly, no Uncle Buck with John Candy, yet another New Year’s Eve spent in the company of that dorky tit, Jools Holland n pals, the sense that there’s nothing to look forward to until the cherry blossom is out and the spectre of yet another January spent water-skiing through horizontal rain to work in a basement office where people regularly and mysteriously leave perfect arse-shaped prints on the toilet seat.