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.