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.

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.

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.