Back On The Wards

Regular visitors to Clubdes – yes, all four of you – will have noticed that the right hand side of this page hasn’t been updated this week. Rest assured its not through lack of inspiration because we at ClubDes are blessed with a fertile mind, unfortunately the body is not so well endowed. Except for the huge chopper that is.

So we’re back on the wards for another 10 days of fun filled excitement in what I like to think was a pre-planned sabotage of my last course of treatment by all the hot nurses who never got to give me the bed bath they were all clearly gagging for. That’s my story anyway and I’m sticking to it. Coincidentally, although I’m on a different ward this time round, I did notice my old murse Arvind had transferred wards too and he still has that glint in his eye…

It was quite the surprise to find that I was no longer on the ward where all the cool kids hang out. It was even more of a surprise to find that Ward 16 has a higher mortality rate than 17. Considering that two people died on my last visit to Ward 17 I’ve been expecting to witness a steady stream of bodies to start trucking their way past my room each day. It hasn’t eventuated and to date there have been no deaths which is even more amazing considering that in the week that I’ve been there I’ve been given the wrong medication - not once, but twice - and have even been ‘misplaced’ by my duty nurse. Admittedly I was on my bed the whole time but my room is a big place, I can see how she missed me there.

Infact it’s been all rather quiet and dare I say it – peaceful. That was until the lady with explosive diarrhea moved into the room next to me and started using the bathroom we share. There’s nothing quite as invigorating as hearing someone ablute throughout the day, especially when it sounds like they’re exploding every time they take a dump. To her credit though, despite sounding like a espresso machine on steroids, I never found the toilet in such a state as to look like one, so she either cleaned up big time or it was all for show. Thankfully her stay was a short one and my carzie has returned to sole occupancy.

The Beijing Olympic committee is my other neighbors. An elderly Asian lady is in Room 1 and true to form, so are 47 members of her immediate family. My Chinese is not what it should be but they seem to be coping well despite the space restrictions. I'm best placed for when the food starts cooking though, I'll be first in line for a Number 5 and some wantons.

What a multicultural world we live in aye? Why at this very moment I am typing this in an Internet cafe run by a Somalian couple. They run the wig and hair extension shop next door too which is handy really because I'm in the market for some braids. Unfortunately I still have the remnants of the ADHD boy haircut my wife gave me a few weeks back so it's going to have to be my pubes this time round.

Back on the ward there is a large Maori nurse that spends her evenings phoning the whanau from the front desk right outside my room and speaks to all 23 of them in turn. Sometimes they discuss the content of the Ngati Porou website she spends the rest of her shift surfing. And I can’t forget the Chuman who bought me mandarins (the fruit, not the people) on his visit with the Help Desk Massive last week.

So it’s fair to say that yet again, it’s been emotional. I can’t say that I’ve found this visit quite as inspirational as the last but I have had a few small highlights, my sexy blue eyed blonde Saffa physio, Sam, being one.

She’s worth getting sick again for.

Real Men Eat Jaffas.

There are some seriously disturbing trends with young men these days and for once it’s got nothing to do with porn, drugs or sex. Why is it that just about every adolescent boy is trying their best to look like a girl?

Every time I'm anywhere I’m struck by just how many long fringed, long sided, long mulleted bouffant hairdos there are being worn by fellas. Throw in some daggy sunnies – present company excluded Big Al – skin tight jeans and you have something that’s neither hetro nor metro sexual, but asexual. It’s not even grunge or alternative, which in my day was about as asexual as a fella could get but even then everyone knew Kurt Cobain, who we were all trying to mimic, was a fella. But now our young men are dressing more and more like the Hanson boys and look where it got them.

‘Freedom of expression’ this looking like a girl might be, but its also making them look a lot like a waster. How do they see exactly with their long fringes pasted over their eyes? If it’s impaired vision you want why not just whack a pair of testes on the forehead as well and complete the look? It can only be described as not wanting to look like anything but trying to look like something. Make up your minds I say and either choose to look like a man or tuck it between the legs and go girl. And don’t get me started on the lady boys who then want to look hard by wearing their hoodie up whilst in the mall, thus removing their last bit of sensory perception. I’ve decided that to combat this I’m going to start giving a downtrou to anyone wearing a hoodie inside. We'll see how long the hoodies stay up when the tweeds start a comin down.

It’s a sad indictment on society today that mothers are happy for their boys to look like shaggy dogs rather than make them cut their hair and risk having little Tarquin resent them for it. Fathers are too scared to be real men in case they get done for abuse and are not dragging their sons down to the barbers every six weeks like our Dads did with us. And lets get one thing straight right now - a barber shop is not to be confused with a hair salon either. You don’t get a wash, a shampoo and a pair of boobies in the face like you do at Rodney ‘Titty’ Wayne when you visit a real barbers, which is a good thing because frankly, teats have no place near a real haircut. That's why these haircuts exist todays because these wasters go to the salon and have some chick boob bag them rather than using a bowl on the head as a guide like Mum used too.

My step father was like clock work when it came to haircuts. We’d be down at the Naenae barbers five minutes after it opened at 7am to wait in line with all the retired guys who were there for three things only; a cut, some tobacco and to get the hell out of the house and away from their wives. Old Les was my favourite barber, he’d been doing in so long that he had a permanent hunchback which meant you could never quite tell if he was looking at you or not due to the height of his head and his inability to raise it. He knew everybody by name and their favourite cut but then that was easy because there’s only one cut at a real barbers shop; short back and sides.

There’s nothing quite exhilarating as walking to school with a new haircut on a cold morning that still stings around the neck because Les ran the clippers a little too close. Recently my wife gave me an unexpected blast back to my past when she gave me a number one all over whilst cutting my hair. It’s really quite something to see a man in his thirties with an ADHD kids cut but I’ll tell you what, I never got mistaken for a girl.

To top all this madness off, Reading Cinemas – the arsehole of cinemas – apparently no longer sell Jaffas, Snifters or Pineapple Lumps. Well fuck me, what else is there to eat at the movies? And it’s typical really of a company like Reading, who charge exorbitant prices for movies that if you haven’t already downloaded it off the Net you can buy on DVD in a week’s time anyway, to deny you your favourite sweet. Reading's like to think that their big chairs and big screens make the difference when compared with other cinemas but when they’ve run all the other theatres – whose seats and screens are fine by the way – out of business then I’ll tell you what will be even bigger at Readings; the prices! The pricks.

I’m going to go to Readings every weekend now just for the hell of it and conceal on my persons, quite possibly in my cavities, one of those catering sized bags of Jaffas that you get from Moore Wilson’s. I’m not going to eat them mind you; I’m just going to roll them around the theatre so that when they’re cleaning up they’ll think “Shit. Jaffas. We don’t sell those how the hell did they get in here! Someone’s bringing in food they bought elsewhere…”. The ultimate mindfuck. Then they’ll want to start searching everybody who goes in to see a movie from that point on and my work there will be done, because no one is gonna put up with that shit, no matter how big the seats are.

Because you see real men eat Jaffas. And get their hair cut at a barbers and not Titty Waynes. That’s just how we roll.

Cold, Hard Trading Cards

It has been a few days since I last cracked a fat over anything but thankfully the wife I never had, DougalMougal, has made me see the error of my ways and reminded me that with great power comes great responsibility. Well he didn’t say that in so many words. Or any of those words actually, in fact I made that entire bit up.

I’ve actually been busy finishing the biggest bag of Twisties I’ve ever seen. No not really but actually that’s not so far from the truth. My son, ClubDes Junior, is collecting the rugby cards you find in the chippie packets these days and shit has been getting serious. I’ve eaten so many potato chips I now bleed when I poo. Those cards are playground currency I tell you and they’re more valuable than cold hard cash. The kids won’t even accept cash for them actually, the only legal tender they recognise is a 5cm square bit of plastic with some meathead on the front.

It wasn’t long before Junior soon became a Don of the playground with his mega collection, thanks to my pimping the crew at ClubDes for their cards from the packets they’ve been getting out of the vending machine in the hall. What started out as a harmless bit of helping out the boy though has quickly become a race to see whose kid can get the full set first between me and the Hard Out Harry parents of the Saffa he’s best mates with.

Initially their Mum was having none of it because her boys were ripping through the packets and not actually eating the chips and if there is one thing that rips the undies of a Saffa it’s wasted money, but as soon as she got a sniff of competition then shit really kicked off. Typical bloody Saffas. I wonder if they’ll consider a winner takes all competition to see whose cable contains the most chip fragments, theirs or mine.

All of this reminds me of my school days spent collecting trading cards. Back in my day you got bubblegum with your cards. It tasted like crap and lasted about all of four chews and was made from jandal cutoffs but we didn’t care because it was all about the cards. Batman, Ninja Turtles, WWF, Rugby League – you name it we collected it. The token Indian boy at my school, because there really weren’t that many back then, always got the whole set first because his Dad owned the local diary and he bought boxes of the stuff from wholesalers. You see that’s the secret to buying trading cards, as I would later learn whilst in the early days of my inauguration to the world of comic book shop geekdom, because each box is guaranteed to contain a full set plus rare cards.

There was no flogging rare shit off on Trade Me back then either, you begged, borrowed or stole your way to a whole set in those days and I stole anything that wasn’t tied down. I remember fleecing all the girls in 2nd form of their Neighbours cards, not because I collected them but just because I could. I was exempt from the suspicion of the theft too on account of being a fella and no fella would have been caught dead with Neighbours cards. Who collects Neighbours cards, I mean really? My sister did and she got the whole set too.

I reckon my violating of the girls collections stemmed from the fact that I had been burnt before with trading cards. Karma had paid me a visit earlier in ’86 when me and Willie Gee went halvsies in the Soccer World Cup collectors set. There were 52 playing cards to collect and through our collective resources we scored the lot, including the four very rare ace cards. Once we had the set we took turns in holding on to them for a week, laying them out, admiring them, that kind of thing. We were too young back then to know how to have a jimmy but you can bet if did we would have over them, they were that good.

Only they went missing onetime whilst on Willie’s watch and I never ever saw them again. It was very nearly the end of a beautiful friendship. They were good cards too dammit and I’d be living of the profits of having sold them cards today if I had them, not that I’d ever sell them. But they’d be my retirement plan. Willie lives up in the Coromandal these days cultivating the ganja. I bet he sold those cards for a bag of fertiliser or something. I got mine back in later years though when I pinched half his G.I.Joe collection.

Ah well. That’s life and you’ve just got to get on with things really. As I write this Junior only needs three cards to collect the set while Saffaboy needs only the one. It’s gonna be a close call. Maybe I should break into their house and steal his…

Shooting Blanks.

Forgot about the politically correct stealing bull rush, they’ve gone and fucked up something far more important – fly spray.

We’re doing the eco-friendly thing at our house by starting to build a compost bin. It’s early days and given that its still warm this time of the year the thing is starting to smell a little – it has food scraps in it after all. It's now attracting so many flys that you’d think it was a long drop we’d put in round the back and not a compost bin. Being the crafty buggers that flys are, they’re even managing to make their way indoors in record numbers, despite the house being locked up all day!

We’ve gone through two cans of flyspray in about a week and I thought it was down to sheer numbers that they were still hanging around en masse, but one read of the can and I now know why. It has no smell, it’s safe for the environment, it doesn’t stain and it doesn’t affect those with allergies. Great. I’ll tell you what else it doesn’t do; fucken work! I’m surprised they didn’t list that little gem of info on the can but maybe there wasn’t enough room for it after they finished listing all the shit they must think we buy it for. I thought I was buying insect killer but it appears I purchased a can of air. My bad.

We had the same problem whilst holidaying in RotoAnus where there are just as many flies as there are Asian tourists. We literally carpet bombed the main living area – hourly – and struggled to find a carcass afterwards. It was like Vietnam all over again! The only logical conclusion was that they were either taking their dead with them, or the fly spray was shit.

I remember the days when fly spray was Agent Orange in a can. Sure it stung your eyes like mace, and burned your tongue so bad that it made everything you ate for a week taste like marmite, but it bloody worked. So what if it left a film so thick that you could write your name in it or left all the asthmatics in a semi-comatose state? It bloody worked. Truth be told, it probably caused genetically abnormalities in the unborn child it was that potent but even that was cool, because Mum still enjoyed a shandy and smoked her Menthol Lights whilst preggers back then anyway because no one had made that particular link yet either.

Menthol Lights, by the way, are not the coolest fag with which to kick off your life long addiction. There’s no street cred to be had with Menthol Lights. I picked them because I liked the green Mackintosh Toffees best - so green had to be good right? Little did I know that Menthol's are the light beer of smoking. I figured that the minty aftertaste had to be a plus, but of course I smelt like a chimney after having stood behind the bike sheds all lunch time so it didn’t matter what my breath smelt like, none of my mates would come close enough to give me a pash anyway. It was only after my one month long smoking career back in college had finally finished did I come to realise that it was down to my choice of Menthol's that had the Smoking Massive cracking up whenever I lit up.

But killing flies was hardcore back in the day. I remember the sticky strips everyone used to buy and hang from their ceilings to trap the little buggers. Genius. I can’t imagine that that would ever catch on again today though, what with everyone so anal about status anxiety and maintaining sparse houses with sparse interiors, but back then it got quite competitive between houses in the street as to who could display the highest body count. My sister and I used to roll a few in a big pile of raisins and chuck it up in the furthest corner of the lounge, just far enough away as to not be scrutinised by the naked eye. Killing flys was the shizz back then.

Sometimes I wonder what became of these sticky strips and then I watch my son eat fruit roll ups and I’m left in no doubt as to what’s become of them.

Remember when everyone had those fly barrier curtain things over the front and back door that were long strips of plastic all joined up? That shit was the bomb. The flies couldn’t fathom it, couldn’t get through. Never could we kids, especially Granddads which was a home made one from some industrial thickness rubber he had had lying around n the shed. Hit that thing at speed and on the wrong angle of trajectory and you could asphyxiate yourself in a way that only Michael Hutchence would approve of.

Yep. Them were simpler times but at least we had our priorities right. It’s a sad day when you can’t even nail the airborne buggers that spread the shit they’ve spent all day walking in.

Beer. It's whats for breakfast.

I got spam mail the other day reminding me that now is the time to vote for Miss Tui 2008 – that great competition that allows pooh chicks, who are always being told by inebriated guys how hot they are, to find out that they’re actually not.

Now its not really spam, because it’s not unsolicited. I signed up for it years ago and although I could, I never quite seem to get round to unsubscribing from the Tui mailing list and I know full well why it is that I don’t. It’s because I’m a sucka. And a fool. A sucka fool . And those of you fluent in jive like I am don’t need to be told what that means.

I’ve been well sucked in by the chief weapon of the Beer Barons, which is fear. A fear that is perpetuated by an advertising campaign that convinces sucka fools like me that if I don’t drink their firewater than I am never going to be a party boy, I’m never going to score the type of chicks that allegedly work in the Tui brewery – they don’t actually because I’ve been there and the girl behind the counter was decidedly A for average – I’m never going to be funny and cool and I’m never going to get any closer to scoring than a bag of Twisties and a Sky 1 late night movie.

Which is all a load of shit and I should know better but yet, somehow, they got me by the seedless grapes all those years ago and now I can’t bring myself to unsubscribe. Perhaps it’s because I enjoy a free perv as much as the next guy, who knows. But it will come as no surprise to you, the reader, to hear me say that I believe we have a drinking problem here in New Zealand. It is predominately a young persons thing but lets not get ageist here; I’ve seen and know of some pretty pickled middle agers too, some of which decided to lower the drinking age a few years back in a moment of clarity that can only be attributed to them being pissed at the time.

We do have a drinking culture and as life gets more and more demanding and the perceived need to fit in and be as popular as fuck grows, you can bet your arse more and more will be consumed. Advertising glorifying beer and its properties doesn’t help. I’m all for freedom of speech and all that rubbish but I reckon it’s time to pull the plug on beer ads. Lets be honest, nobody drinks beer for the taste, its drunk for effect. The pricks make enough money as it is tanking up our kids so why should we allow them to make it look cool when we all know it isn’t. No one ever projectile vomits on those ads, or wets themselves because they can’t get off the couch in time, or plows their ridiculously modified high performance car into two eighty year olds coming home from their 60th wedding anniversary celebration. Wonder why they don’t show that on them thar ads?

A couple of the local dirty girls were on the current affairs program Sunday the other day talking about how common it is these days to be shagging on the first hook up. It’s the done thing, apparently. They were experts on the matter, they’d all had several and that was just that week and they were all very ho hum about the whole thing too, almost teetering on the brink of being bored with the whole concept. “Crikey”, I thought to myself after coming to the realisation that I unfortunately knew none of them, ‘it’s a sad day when sex with strangers becomes boring!”

And let me just say this: I think I pay them a service by calling them ‘dirty girls’ because that has a connotation to it that implies they are actually a bit of alright. These slappers were far from alright. Good from afar springs to mind.

Where were girls like this in my day?! Oh That’s right, they were busy bettering themselves for a future whilst it was we the boys who got shitfaced in the bizarre belief that by being inebriated we would do away with all our awkwardness around anything in a skirt and become instantly attractive to the girl we’d been masturbating all term over. What we actually ended up being was the same bunch of dickheads who still couldn’t put four words together and now smelt of nothing but piss – the bottled variety and quite probably our own because we’d been too tanked to think about not standing out of the wind when having a slash out the back of Bedrocks.

But thankfully the girls of today are making it easier for the boys by getting comatose on booze real quick, real often. Isn’t equality a wonderful thing? Somehow I can’t imagine that’s what Kate Sheppard had in mind all those years ago as she battled to have woman given the right to vote in this country.

I think we as New Zealanders, by definition, are a conservative bunch. We were raised by even straighter parents who themselves fancied a flagon or two. We drink to allow some of the defences we put up come down so that we can say the things we wouldn’t normally say and do the things we normally wouldn’t. Which is fine, hey that’s the purpose of alcohol, to relax oneself, but there comes a point where we cross that line and become a danger to those around us and most importantly ourselves. Too many of our young, beautiful, smart young women are now crossing that line because unfortunately it’s become blurred. Big time.

But it’s not just their fault, there are so many things that cause this need to get hammered and therefore need to change – some of them I’ve covered in previous blogs – but not letting the breweries take the piss, out of us drinking their piss, would be a bloody good start. If we can ban advertising and sponsorship by anything smoking we can do it with anything drinking.

I’ll even unsubscribe from receiving my Tuigram. Right after I’ve voted for Miss Tui 08.


Miss Tui 2008? Homemade bikini optional.

Reading Between The Lines

Some things never change no matter where you are. Like daytime TV – shit whether you’re at home on the couch because you’ve pulled a sickie, or on a hospital bed because you are a sickie. Admittedly I didn’t watch a lot of TV whilst in hospital, but some of the stuff I did was even more disturbing than the abnormal interest my Asian physio had in examining my phlegm each morning.

TV1 news for example, now gives us the weather before, during and after the news. That’s the same weather forecast three times in an hour. Now I would’ve thought that by now, after about 40 years of it having been done the same way each and every night that people would know that the weather is covered in the last ten minutes of the news. If you haven’t figured that out by now then let’s be honest, it’s not going to make a blind bit of difference whether it’s raining or sunny tomorrow because in all probability you are a Mongol and will dress / plan / venture inappropriately regardless of the overhead conditions. Just because your audience is getting dumber TV1, doesn’t mean you have to.

And I love how both channels – TV1 and TV3 – show the same news shots from the same event and try to claim it as ‘exclusive footage’. Did they not see each other standing there whilst they were filming or what? And just because your camera is ten metres closer than the other network’s doesn't mean you can claim to be the ‘first to bring it to you’ either! Munters.

Mind you TV3 aren’t far off having the dudes from Play School present their shows either. Their V8 Supercars coverage on Sundays is presented by the morning crew from The Rock radio station. If you’re not a big fan of the unoriginal Rock team then you’re fucked really, because now they’re on your TV too, lead by Rog, the tiny unattractive man with a voice that sounds like he needs a wheelbarrow to carry his humongous gnads around. He doesn’t, incidentally, because they’re not humongous but it makes you wonder why he, a man with a face for radio, got the job and not some up and coming presenter with a future in the bizzo?

The only saving grace for that lot is Tracy Donaldson gets to be on camera and she’s every bit as good looking as she sounds on the radio. She’s a blondie too which means she has a 95% better chance of appearing on the cover of Cleo than a brunette. I know this because a) I’ve made this observation before in a previous blog and b) thanks to the generous stack of glossy mags I had to work through whilst in hospital I can confirm that nothing has changed. Both Cleo and Cosmo had their usual blond it girl on the cover and inside, pages and pages of how to look like her. They also had in depth earth shattering articles on how to get the career you want. The big secret is just to be yourself. Genius. But now I’m confused – is it try to look like Kate Heigel, or be myself?! Oh fuck. And what if I’m a ginga that looks nothing like Kaye Heigel – is there any hope for me?!

Cleo also had an insightful piece on what guys want in a girl. It looked to me as though the guys were actually asked ‘what gives you a stiffy?’ because the answers were pretty stock standard; nice figure, great legs, firm boobs. Dave on the other hand, liked ‘dresses with flowers on them’, which made me think Dave hadn’t been vetted very well for his sexual preference because I don’t think it was girlies.

Cleo also had their most ‘full on’ sealed section ever, which contained 93 sexpert tricks written by actual pornstars, strippers and sexperts. It contained gems like ‘do it in a public place’, take it ‘slow and steady’ and try ‘using no hands’. Despite having several multiple orgasms by just reading the damn thing I couldn’t help but feel that by using the term ‘full on’ Cleo had reset the bar when it comes to bullshitting their readership. There weren’t even 93 tips either! Just because your audience is getting dumber Cleo, doesn’t mean you have to too.

I wonder if Cleo and Cosmo get the same guy to write their sealed sections as FHM and Ralph do to write their erotic stories. Although FHM try to make like theirs is written by a dirty girl, one who makes good use of her Thesaurus because I for one never knew there were quite so many words that meant ‘ejaculate’. Maybe it’s something that’s only taught in ‘fat guys who want to talk dirty online’ school.

There’s actually very little difference between the likes of Cleo and the likes of FHM. They contain lots of what’s cool, lots of innuendo and lots of girls wearing very little. FHM and Ralph do actually have some interesting stuff in them but it’s buried beneath all the soft porn. Barmaids and girls next door in bikinis were great ten years ago but that was before a little thing called the Internet came along – you may have heard of it – and started delivering free porn daily in any flavour you liked. Surely these lads’ mags are fighting a losing battle for sales because I reckon if you’ve seen one pretty girl holding her naked milkers you’ve seen them all.

What they should do is cut out all the soft porn, seal their issues up each month in a plastic bag and include on the inside a free one time log in to a porn site of your choosing. Now that would be worth $8.

Taking In The Sites of Ward 17

You sure do see some sights in hospital, especially when your room is first cab of the rank and every bugger walks by you to enter the ward.

The upside is that every hot young doctor / nurse / physio has to pass by several times a day, the downside is having every prick take a good long look in trying to see if what you’ve got is any worse than the poor soul they’re coming to see. It’s like some bizarre show and tell for the sick and infirm. Two people died whilst I was there too – I shit you not. That’s taking the game too far I reckon.

But I got my own back. In the morning, as the sun came streaming into my room, I would pull the curtain across the room and delicate poise my daily banana ration between the thighs. It made quite the silhouette I’m told. Other times I would simply lay starkers on my bed pretending to be asleep, or take leisurely strolls up and down the ward after a shower, clad only in a flannel, pretending to look for a towel.

But then you do things like that to pass the time. My wife and I had the most insightful conversations whilst sitting in the various waiting rooms for the various tests, answering the tough questions of life like: If you had to have only the one tube used but inserted into the nose, mouth, anus and urethra - what order would you have them do it in?

Sometimes I didn’t even have to make shit up. A Canadian guy, an orderly, came and took me to x-ray this one night. He spent the entire trip there waxing on about how hot the nurses were on my ward, especially the “cute little blond one with the tight ass”. Quite how he knew the circumference of her sphincter I don’t know because he was hardly Mr Personality or indeed Mr Physical Fitness so I seriously doubt he had ever had the pleasure. And to think that I thought it was his torch or something that keep banging the back of my wheelchair.

Another orderly, the one who looked like he had stepped straight out of a Huey Lewis and the News music video used to stand outside my window and fog it up whilst trying to watch the sports news on my TV. Now I liked to be watched by strange men as much as the next guy, but I would always make a point of waving him into the doorway but the moment I did his pager would always inevitably go off – as did he. Poor guy must have had tourettes or something cause he swore like a sailor. Which probably did nothing for the elderly lady on deaths door in the room next to me either but you never know, it might've been quite soothing. She probably got a lot of that back in her era, when men only had to tell their bitches the once.

The guy who came to empty my rubbish bins was one of those salt of the earth guys who is just simple enough to do the shitty job but enjoys it and takes pride in his work. I don’t think I’ve met anyone quite as excited to see a full rubbish bag or know so much about the literage of a plastic bag. Infact it made him so happy I seriously considered cacking in mine just so I could ring him and let him know it needed changing again. I thought I’d blown it though the day he came round after I had just taken an almighty high fibre diet induced dump in my en suite, but it didn’t seem to bother him, quite the contrary, he went back in twice that morning to check the bin he’d just emptied.

By far the funniest thing I’ve seen in a medical sense though was some years ago whilst waiting to have a blood test one Saturday morning at Valley Diagnostic, the place you go for all sorts of tests and the place where you can drop of all manner of samples. This old guy rocks up with a rather large brown paper bag. He’d obviously been told he needed to bring in a stool sample – but why bring a sample when you can bring the whole stool? Which he had, muddy water and all, inside one of those big preserving jars that your Grandad always kept his pickled onions in. The chick at the counter wasn’t phased in the slightest; she was probably just relieved he took the time to put it in a jar for her.

Now the question I’ve always asked myself is did he poop and scoop, or did he precision aim that sucker straight into the jar…..?