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.

Biohazard: Contains madness and phlegm

 

Hello everyones.  I has been ill a lot lately.  I has bean coffin and coffin and chokin’ and there is lots less oxygen in my brian.  It iz three weaks now and I iz still poorly wiv broncheyetis.  I am bored now.  So I has done lots of fings to keep me happy at home and nice and warm.

I has done drumming.  It looks like this: Please watch this film now coz it is proper cobblers.

 

In my head, my drummings looks like Taylor Hawkins out of the Foot Fighters with boobs or Dave Growl out of the Foot Fighters and Nirvananas with boobs but reely, my drummings iz like a pile of steaming plop and I has coffins a lot too while I am doing them.  Becos I iz a bit old, I has started weeing a bit when I coff.  I am wearing a thingy to soak up the wee.  I don't think the Foot Fighters or dead Khurd Cobain or not dead Katie Perry does wee when they coff. 

I has done art.  Like this, except not like this, because this is a bit shit and my drorings are less shit:

I has done ironings.  This means I get to make the clothes flat as well as doing steme inhalations, wot the doctor said was a good thing for my weezing.

Ironings is good for making things flat and growing flem

It is a lot like a day centre for lazy, daft people in my house but I am the only person hear and I am talking to myself a lot.  I has been ill enough now.  I has coffed up so much furry, green flem that I called the last one Joost and made him a cheese sandwich.  

Please send messages to God and Santa and ask for me to get better soon and get more oxygen in my brian.

Amen.

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.

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.