Friday Night’s Blue Plastic Bag Bastard

As the Scottish songwriter Malcolm Middleton put it, in customary bleak and downbeat tones, “staying in is the new going out.”  The track “Blue Plastic Bags” refers to what you carry your booze home in after an early Friday evening jaunt to your local shop.  Being something of a miserable bastard, this initially appealed to me as recognition of the sad realisation that you’ve reached that point in your life when you can’t afford nights out on a regular basis.  But recently the song reflects for me the much stronger, middle-aged-and-past-it ambivalence I have towards EVER going out.  I wouldn’t claim to have shackled myself fully to the harness of misanthropy, but I am finding myself increasingly in a position of jogging alongside that grim cart.

I look forward to Friday nights relishing the absence of any commitment to leaving the house.  I’m happy to sit alongside the family, fuck about on Twitter while they watch some crap on telly, pay more attention during a post-watershed comedy and finally polish off the final glass of wine and packet of Cheese and Onion Disco crisps to the accompaniment of BBC4’s music night.  Once the kids are in bed and I have started snoring, Mrs Bastard kicks me and I drag myself upstairs and pass out.

Mrs B sometimes indulges in a futile fantasy-world in which she believes she can tempt me to take her to a nice pub for a drink.  By “nice” pub, I refer to one which is decorated more pleasingly than our lounge.  The problem is, the décor alone fails to outweigh the burden of sharing my space with STRANGERS and the added burden of paying prices for alcohol that feel like financial rape.  My lounge contains no strangers and the booze that comes in blue plastic bags means I don’t resent drinking it.

So.  Sorry Mrs B, but a night in it is.

But if you want to socialise with FRIENDS?  (And yes, I do have some.  I knew what you were thinking there.)  Well, they can come round here and share the wonderful AMBIENCE of our lounge, our affordable booze, our choice of music on the home juke box, our bar snacks, our absence of strangers, our laughter filling the room and not some other fucking CACKLING WITCH or GUFFAWING BLOKEY BLOKE… (easy, settle down, breathe in, 1…2…3…4…5… and breathe out) …and a carpeted toilet to boot.

One day perhaps going out will be the new staying in.  But for now, to the sofa I go, to make arse-moulds in a sedate non-frenzy of Pinot Grigio and Discos.

My Poo Looked Like Morph

If you rifle through the archives you might notice that back in January 2011 I recounted for your amusement and disgust ten “true tales of bastardness involving poo.”  One theme cementing those stories together (in a sticky conglomeration of craposity much like an actual poo) was the existence of a victim.  This precluded, therefore, any instances of pooing in which no innocents were harmed.  Reluctantly, I held back on two highly notable experiences and thereafter forgot that I had not shared them in blog form.  So, it’s about time I did.

The first tale is the time I did a poo that looked like Morph.

Now you might be thinking that this is impossible.  Morph is human shaped.  Admittedly he is brown - a light brown much like the sort of poo you’d have following a day of eating cake and biscuits.  But he has four limbs; and there’s no way that a rectum can manipulate itself like some kind of anus contortionist to crimp out anything other than a lozenge-shaped waste product.  “Impossible!” I hear you cry.  And indeed, “Impossible” I remarked to myself when I turned to inspect this intriguing marvel of nature, this curious oddity of excrement.

And because it was so impossibly curious, I took a photo of it on my phone.  And showed everyone.

Sadly, the photo no longer exists as I have changed my phone three times since, so let me describe this rectal abomination.  It was in every way just like Tony Hart’s desktop plasticine friend, minus the eyes, mouth, nose and half an arm.  Yes, it had three and a half limbs.  How so?  Well I have pondered long and hard on how I managed this, but I suspect that it was one of those long and thin turds which twisted and rested upon itself in such a way as to coincidentally create a shape that was almost entirely consistent with the human form.

The photographic proof was often passed around the pub or sent to iron-stomached friends and it is with regret that this lost relic of mutated nature has since been flushed from existence.

Which brings me to my second tale.  I was 17 and visiting relatives in New York.  During a large family gathering (at which, incidentally, I met a second cousin named Enus but pronounced Anus) I went upstairs for a poo.  It was an en suite bathroom and less likely to invite usage, thus affording me some privacy in case I created an unsavoury aftertaste or some awkwardly anti-social noises.  Given that your average American eats a lot more than we do and often has the girth to prove it, you’d think that Armitage Shanks USA would fit wider U-bends in their bogs rather than narrower ones.  However, in this house it was not the case.  And what I considered to be a very average sized poo, full of English reserve and modesty, completely failed to flush first time.

As the floater baulked the sides of the pan in mockery of my effort to dispose of it, there was a knock on the door and a voice saying something like, “Hey Buddy, are ya finished in there?” (It probably wasn’t that, but you’ll notice I tried to make it sound American.)

Panicking that a second flush might be as futile as the first and realising that the pressure to vacate the bathroom after attempt number two would be overwhelming, I had to improvise quickly.  At home we always kept a wire coat-hanger behind the lavatory and used this to chop up anything unflushable.  My American cousins clearly had nothing of the sort to hand.  And so the only thing to hand was… my hand.

A couple of Hong Kong Phooey chops to that resistant faecal dollop ensured a successful second flush.  I left the bathroom with my head held high and returned to the party to shake the hands of many relatives who were fortunately oblivious to the depths to which my hand had recently sunk.