Pharaoh Toot’n’Pootin’

Apologies in advance for the scatological nature of this post but sometimes you just have to deal with the crap as it hits you.

OK. I’ll just come out and say it. I seem to be retaining more wind as I get older. Or generating more wind. One of the two. Maybe even both.

Now I don’t want to give the impression that I am someone who drops their guts at the, er, drop of a hat. Because I am not. I am, in fact, legendary in my house for not farting. My butt is, by and large, a smokeless zone.

Tight as a steel drum. The Royal seal unbroken.

This is great. Because when someone drops a 10lb silent but deadly in my house no one dreams of accusing me of doing it because, well, hell would freeze over first.

There is a downside though.

See, I still produce gas. The methane seams are still there and rich in ore. The pressure has to be released at some point.

My wife, Karen, says I just save it all up for “proper” toilet visits.

And this is true.

Prior to the main performance the orchestra will tune itself up nicely and noisily – wind instruments first – and a great trumpeting clarion call will signify the commencement of the William Tell Overture.

I swear to God I could probably play a trumpet with my butt and hold a single note for a good 10 minutes.

And the older I get the longer the duration of the air exchange seems to get.

This is fine when I am at home. When the kids and the wife are busy downstairs and are deafened by the sounds of life. It is not so fine when I am in the toilets at work. Because at work I prefer to run on silent. It’s like an unspoken rule. Processes of the bum shall be neither seen nor heard. It is a brave man indeed who lets his ack-ack gun blaze away in earshot of his work colleagues and cares not a jot who hears.

I am not that man. Which makes my ability to store up vast quantities of methane gas a distinct disadvantage.

What I need, people, is for someone to invent a bum silencer or a butt muffler. Like the kind of thing assassins attach to their long range rifles so they may do their nefarious deeds without alerting anyone to their presence.

It needs to attach with an air-tight seal but be non-invasive.

It needs to be easy to clean and portable. The kind of thing one could keep in a man-bag (or even a handbag) without arousing smirking curiosity.

It needs to be affordable.

So. All you inventors out there. Consider yourself duly commissioned. Think outside the box. Have some fun.

Even better: have a blast.

So that, unbeknownst to my work colleagues, I can have one too.

I’m No Longer Bringing Home The Bacon

If I’m honest it’s been on the cards for a while.

The suspicious looks, the sharp intakes of breath whenever I got down to work. The feeling that things weren’t quite right between us. I knew that, deep down, sooner or later I’d be let go. Given the heave-ho. The big hoof.

I still feel ambivalent about it. I didn’t dislike it but it wasn’t something I went overboard over either. What can I say? For a time, due to familial constraints it was a necessity, but my ambitions have always lain elsewhere anyway.

It affects my wife and my children, of course. It’s quite a major change. It literally affects what food we can now put onto the dining table; how we eat. If we eat even.

But I’m fine with it. Honestly. Maybe I’m still in shock. The reality of the situation hasn’t yet kicked in.

*sigh*

I hardly dare say the words.

Bacon intolerant.

It kind of rolls off the tongue but still seems an odd concept. Is it common I wonder? Is it even a recognized condition?

Bacon intolerant.

Bacon used to seem so innocuous. Something I’d have with a full English or occasionally in a sandwich if I was feeling lazy. Nice with chips and a fried egg.

But it wasn’t something I ever craved. I could live without it. Just as well really. Because now I’m going to have to.

It gives me... for want of a better acronym, IBS. Painful guts. Agonising wind. Tortuous cramps. Enough to keep me awake for a night so that I feel like death warmed up (or even cold bacon uncooked) the next day. It affects my work, my writing, my entire joie de vivre.

I’ve had to say no to it. My wife, a true bacon lover, has gone into mourning. A number of her superlative dishes feature bacon as an ingredient. They will have to be modified or dropped or else I no longer eat with my family at those times but make do with a tin of soup or a spring roll from the local Chinese.

Little pig, little pig, how divisive you are!

I’m hoping it is just bacon. Just rashers. But I admit I am feeling a growing suspicious towards pork and crackling and chops... and trotters I’ve never been into anyway. And do not ever serve me a hog’s head – I will just take the apple from its mouth and shove it somewhere where the sun don’t shine. I guarantee you won’t like it.

So. Goodbye bacon. Goodbye butties. Goodbye to the soft pink rashers of my childhood. Goodbye to those gloriously blackened crispy bits.

I’m going cold turkey. The war of attrition has begun.

Me and the Danish are through.

Hiccups And Bile

A ragbag post this as due to a poor night’s sleep (due to a bad stomach) my brain feels like it’s been given the full works by Colonel Sanders.

I arrived at work this morning and realized that I wasn’t as popular as I once thought I was the moment that someone else got the “mwah mwah dahling” hug and air-kiss treatment while my greeting was very much an afterthought. An “oh hello there I didn’t see you beavering away beneath that rock and now that we’ve made eye contact I’d better acknowledge you just to maintain appearances” sort of look.

I responded with an Inspector Zen-like look of subtlety and European enigma but I suspect I merely looked like I was fighting to keep an unhealthy amount of flatulence safely contained within my gut.

Which funnily enough, I was. It was something I ate. A homemade chicken and bacon pie last night. I’m fine with chicken. I’m fine with bacon. I’m fine with pie. But for some reason, now that I have clocked over 40 years on the ol’ age-o-metre, I find that my stomach is starting to rebel against some really bizarre and nominally innocuous food stuffs. I mean what could be less offensive than chicken and bacon? (I, of course, address this question to all non-vegetarians in the audience – thank you for coming; do try the veal.) I’ve eaten both for years but suddenly, over the last 12 months, my colon has decided that as a combo the 2 taken together are poison. My guts swell up and produce gas which my body refuses to let go off and I am in pain as a consequence.

My wife, when I tell her of this, looks at me with eyes that speak volumes of the years and years of IBS she has suffered and I can hear the words “now you know it feels like” sung by invisible angelic voices over my right shoulder. The guy over my left is pulling his pants down and farting.

I suspect I may be clinically insane at this point in my blog.

And then to top it all I seem to have been embroiled against my will in a row with another work colleague from another department for reasons I can’t go into here but suffice it to say I am innocent of all wrong doing (apart from nicking a biro from the stationery cupboard once a number of years ago). Sadly I am being held responsible for things I have no responsibility for and this person is refusing to take my calls, emails and offers of free pens.

I am not someone who co-exists with ill feeling at all well but have done all I can to clarify my position so I am content to let the hurricane exhaust itself on the beach before I venture out to sea again with that particular sailor. No jokes about Seaman Staines please.

And lastly, whilst examining my blogging stats in the way one examines one’s navel, I noticed that one of the search terms that has driven traffic to my blog over recent weeks has been “hiccups and bile”.

How very apt.

Monday is it? Time for some Boomtown Rats, I reckon. Ta ta.

Mugged By Kindness

This is probably evidence – not that any is needed – that I am a true curmudgeon.

Picture this: I’m walking home. I need to cross a road. I pause at the kerb as I can see out of the corner of my right eye that as car is waiting to turn left across my field of progress.

Yes. I really do have a “field of progress”.

Now, rather sanely, I decide to halt forward momentum at this point. I don’t want to get into physical intimacy with a metallic object that is travelling at 20mph. Besides which he has a right of way.

The Green Cross Code Man and Tufty the squirrel would both be applauding me at this point. I’ve done the right thing, you see. All those road safety lessons as a child have paid off.

The driver however brings his vehicle to a halt and rather insistently waves me across.

I obey but instinctively feel aggrieved and annoyed. It isn’t right, you see.

The road was completely empty behind him so there was absolutely no reason for him to make a point of stopping on my account. Another two seconds and I could have crossed the road perfectly safely (if not more safely) without his flamboyant display of largesse.

He had the right of way. It’s perfectly clear: the Highway Code dictates that he should not have stopped but continued on his way.

Now, maybe I am just being ungrateful? After all, I would feel a darn sight more aggrieved if he’d mounted the pavement, motored his radiator grill right up my jacksy and then continued merrily on his way without stopping to shout even the briefest of apologies.

But I can’t get over the feeling that his gesture was more about power and superiority than kindness. I didn’t need him to stop. I felt almost bullied into crossing the road in front of him.

The danger with not following the expected codes of conduct of course is that your actions can be misinterpreted. What if his hand signal to cross the road was actually his attempt to dislodge an angry wasp from the breast pocket of his shirt? What if he was merely clearing the air after a particularly foul air biscuit (“fart” to you and me)?

The answer is obvious.

I’d be lying under the bonnet of his car in a non-KwikFit approved position, leaking claret all over the macadam and listening to him shouting at me that he had right of way and what the hell did I think I was doing trying to cross the road in front of him?

*sigh*

Maybe I need to get out more?

Or less?

A Sign Of Madness?

Possibly I’m over-worked.

Possibly it’s a sign of early dementia.

But as I walked to work this morning I found myself musing on whether there is a medical condition whereby people name their own farts and whether this condition has an appropriately double-barrelled Latin sounding title.

“Hello, I’m Billy Nomates and I suffer from Flatulence Nomenclature Disorder.”

If there is such a condition and it doesn’t yet have a medical title can I patent F.N.D?

Hmm.

I think I need a damn good holiday...