My Top 10 Bastard Vomits

It’s good to share, especially bodily fluids and substances, and some time ago I shared with you, Dear Reader, the top 10 poo-related tales from my life.  Such an out-pouring of nostalgic self-indulgent depravity garnered more plaudits than most other blog posts of mine; and so it is, that I now develop that theme and spew forth from my past my top 10 vomit-related incidents.

 

10. The 70s was a great time for car and coach travel.  There was no air-con, the suspension in most vehicles was as flexible as a concrete slab being dragged down a stone staircase and a relaxed attitude to car safety meant sitting wherever there was room.  We holidayed a lot in a caravan that we towed to Cornwall, my family and my Uncle, Aunt and cousins, crammed into a Volvo estate, dragging the portable holiday home along the A303 at 60 mph for about 8 eight hours, all the kids in the boot.  I’d last about two hours before feeling ill, regardless of the travel sweets, at which point I’d clamber from boot to back seat and sit on my Mum’s lap, head out of the window.  Despite the G-force and the consequent flapping of my cheeks so that my face appeared to crawl backwards behind my ears, I wouldn’t feel any better, and at some point I’d vomit.  At that speed, the sick would spread itself all over the back window of the estate car.  Completely.  We’d arrive at the caravan site and my Mum would retrieve a spatula intended for the Bar-B-Q and sort out the by-now-crusty layer of discarded breakfast.

 

9.  I won’t be taking the credit for every vomit in this list.  This one goes to my friend Pat, aka “CJ” which stood for Cambodian Joe, a rather cruel nickname bestowed on him at secondary school on account of his lithe frame and the famine ravaging Indo-China at the time.  Ceej (short for CJ) liked a Guinness and on no less than two occasions demonstrated his stylish “puke-while-you-walk” move.  Strolling between pubs he would turn his head to one side and hurl over his shoulder without even breaking stride.  With a cool wipe of his mouth he’d assure us that he was OK and the next round was on him.

 

8. Running the risk of repeating myself, in case you missed it in the poo-related list, the puke my little brother did in response to the turd I left in the bath makes the top ten here.  I’ll let you investigate the details from that earlier blog post, but suffice it to say, there was no water in the bath, I was experimenting and my Mum bloody killed me afterwards.

 

7. My first ever trip abroad was a day-trip to Boulogne when I was about 13.  I vomited before we hit the coast and cringed to see the resultant hot gut-juice find the gully on the coach that carried it five rows of seats towards the back.  My partner for the trip was allowed to move away, the teacher scolded me for not forewarning him and securing the service of the available bucket and I spent the day in France lurking round the alleyways of the town, alone, enduring the after-shock mini-pukes and generally feeling like a complete fucking leper.

 

6. At a more mature age, nearing 40, and as Head of the Humanities faculty at the school in which I worked, I felt it to be correct and appropriate to set a good example to those younger colleagues for whom an end of term night out required the multiple consumption of shots.  I proved that I could take those shots like the best of them.  It wasn’t the Sambuca that caused me to ask my wife to stop the car three times on the way home so I could puke, it was my car-sickness.  I get car-sick, that’s all.  Nothing to do with Sambuca.

 

5. As a student, I went inter-railing with three mates.  Our first night was spent on a ferry crossing from Harwich to the Hook of Holland.  Once the bar closed, the need for alcohol (peer-pressure, of course – none of us really “wanted” anymore) lured us to check out the duty free shop where they sold a liquor called “Underburg”.  By the morning, given the motion of the sea and the delicate constitution of yours truly, I had added the prefix “Ch” to that drink.

 

4. My most recent sick was last week.  I had my normal breakfast of four Weetabix (with chocolate chips in it), took out my phone, belched and deposited a mouthful on my phone-case.  A bit out of the blue, that.

 

3. Names and details spared, I was once (it was one of very few times) kissing a girl, when I had to turn to vomit.  Drunkenness is a wonderful tool for getting someone to suspend their taste and dignity long enough to kiss you, but that suspension didn’t extend to continue a kiss after I’d done some interior decorating of my mouth with burning hot beer-fuelled stomach bile.  And I’d assumed she wasn’t that fussy.

 

2. I worked in a pub in Reading, while at University, called The Turk’s Head.  On my 20^th birthday, which started in a different pub at noon and finished in the Turk’s, my friends decided to kindly present me with a gift of a “Turk’s Head” t-shirt.  I put it straight on and it remained in its pristine, washing-powder-advert state of purest white for about half-an-hour, before I decided to lie down in a puddle of piss right underneath the urinals and get sick all over myself.  Come the morning, I felt that no washing powder advert would persuade me to do anything other than dispose of the thing.

 

1. School trips at primary school tended to be to either Devon or Somerset.  Either way, a fucking long trek on a 1970s coach.  Something marginally less comfortable than being held hostage by terrorists.  On one particular day trip from Combe Martin on the north Devon coast to Exeter in the South, I happened to prepare for the hour-long journey back by purchasing a can of limeade and a mint-choc-chip Cornetto.  The offspring of this unwise combination, coming as it did at the moment when I stepped off the coach outside our hotel, was as green as summer grass and as toxic as nuclear waste.  There was no doubting that my pre-journey snack had proved a poor choice.

 

So there we are, the contents of ten stomach-churning tales.  We have all met Hughie and Ralph for one reason or another. They are our friends and don’t forget, it is only for that moment in which it happens that getting sick isn’t one of life’s most laudable and levelling pleasures.

Consternation over a dog poo outside St Albans train station

At first, the fear dictated that there had been a death.  A crowd gathered on the pavement immediately outside the sliding-door entrance to St Albans City train station.  Struck by horror, their contorted faces dipped as one to scrutinise the ground between their circle of feet.  From the ticket barrier I caught sight of the commotion and surmised that the object of common viewing, of shared shock, must be a body, a fallen person, a casualty or perhaps even a corpse, freshly robbed of life.

 

It was in fact a dog poo.

 

In most other cities and certainly in any decade before the 1990s, this would have prompted no fascination at all.  But this was today, in the middle-class commuter city that boasts the highest house prices of any London satellite settlement; and this was a gloriously bright beige exhibit, resting crudely in an erratic formation of clumps, each one almost the size of a horse’s, starkly drawing attention to itself, strewn across that entrance as if to make a point, as if an over-sized dog had a political agenda it wanted to share with every St Albanian intent on railway travel today.  In short, it was a fucking huge pile of conspicuous shit left right in everybody’s way.

 

“You’d think one of the station staff would clean it up,” complained one indignant woman in a tone of voice that affected a degree of disassociation from faecal matter that is naturally impossible for a human.

 

“Don’t tread in it!” another woman warned her children, tugging at their arms in an effort to circumvent the offending land-mine of turd.  In the same way that our children are spared the fresh air, the freedom and the dangers that the offspring of the 60s and 70s faced and relished daily, so are they protected from ever standing in dog shit these days.  I have two children and notwithstanding the fact that one of them trod in our own dog’s plop in the garden last week, I’m pretty sure that they’ve both traversed childhood without the inconvenience of having to scrape stubborn excrement from between the lines of rubber that form the grip on a trainer sole.

 

They say that trauma burns images into the brain and that these remain for much time afterwards.  I personally cannot cleanse my memory of that scene today, but it has only been a few hours.  I grieve for those poor children, whose sense of horror was fuelled by the adults around them who were unable to cope with the situation.  In these moments, children lose that sense of security, that naïve faith in grown-ups that had led them to assume that we can protect them from anything and deal with every difficulty in life.  I daresay today was an immutable rite of passage for one or two of them.

 

I fled the scene.  I am not one to rubber-neck on motorways and there was no aid I could lend to this tragedy.  My hope is that the emergency services will remove all evidence of this canine arse-spillage before I use the station tomorrow, but not before some small spark of light can illuminate the grim darkness of today, ideally courtesy of some poor sod stepping right in it; because to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, “Life does not cease being funny when people die or a dog shits on the pavement any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”

Extremist (Anti-Casualist) Bastards

Smokers, as opposed to people who smoke, contain amongst their number an extremist group who only respect other smokers who are addicted to nicotine and do at least 20 a day; and they consider anyone who casually smokes - on occasion and through choice - as inferior apostates who deserve to burn (or smolder) in Hell.  These people are Anti-Casualist Bastards.

There is an attitude rife in our society that mirrors the violently prejudiced intolerance of religious extremists, but is applied to some of the most mundane lifestyle choices that people make.  These extremists refuse to entertain the idea that something for which they nurse a deep passion or addiction can be enjoyed by non-zealots.  Smoking has always been one.  I was a smoker for a time as a young man, because I enjoyed it (and I believed I looked fucking awesomely cool), but I was the recipient of generously deployed disdain from proper smoker friends.  The fact that I smelt less bad than they did, squandered less money on fags and could never compete with the sheer amount of shit in their lungs and capillaries made me a pariah and isolated me from their closed-shop collective.  They “owned” smoking and I was a casual thief.

Football is the same.  Until I recently fell out of love with the game, I moved in the midst of arrogant fans who cursed – with a joviality totally concealed by animosity – anyone who claimed to be a supporter, but didn’t go to every possible match.  Should anyone care even less about a team, should they dare to “quite support Arsenal” by keeping an eye on most results and merely preferring them to other teams, then these extremist bastards would seek to arm these casual fans with bells, campaign to have them deported to a leper colony and refuse them the right to even mention the sacred name of their team.

There are charity-shop users who scowl at the rest of us for buying anything new, when there is so much barely soiled clothing available  cheaply (albeit not really much cheaper than the sweat-shop-produced cheap-as-cheap-labour clothing that lines the aisles of the major supermarkets).

There are vegetarians who would tear with their teeth at the flesh of casual vegetarians.

There are commuters who can detect casual train-users by their bewildered looks, inability to dart to the correct area of a platform where the train doors line up and by their propensity for politeness.  This weaker species is in danger of being stared at in an aggressive manner by extremist commuters, just for turning up and stealing the precious little amounts of oxygen available within a carriage.

If we’re going to speculate on the psychological compunctions behind such anti-casualism, then perhaps it is part of our natural territorial instincts; that desire that no one should piss on your piss; in which case the only solution for us casualists is simply that.  If you don’t commute but have to travel in rush hour, just piss yourself a space on the platform; and if you fancy a casual fag outside a pub one day, piss a ring around yourself to ward off the smokers.

Bastard Dog

We’ve got a bloody dog now.

 

I’ve never had a dog before, never wanted one; and I’d effectively stonewalled all attempts by my family to talk me into getting one.  Until this summer.  Now we’ve got one, a rescue dog from the local RSPCA and they all love him to bits.

 

But I don’t.

 

It’s been a total culture shock allowing an animal of significant size to inhabit my living space and it is this learning experience that I would like to share with you now, so that you can either laugh with me or at me, depending on where you stand on the Dog-Love Spectrum.  Personally, I’m somewhere in between “indifferent” and “irritated”.

 

His name is Harry and this is one of three words that he definitely understands, the others being “sit” (which he is capable of complying with if he isn’t distracted by another dog or a leaf moving in the wind) and “paw” (which prompts his only trick as such, that of lifting a paw.)  My family believe that he also understands all of our names, “dinner”, “walk” and “do you want to go outside for poos and wees”.  I’m not convinced.  Nothing in his expression or reaction to these words suggests to me that his brain capacity is coping with that amount of data.  What I do know is that he certainly does not understand the words “Bad dog”, “Piss off” or “Don’t lick the fucking carpet!”

 

Nursing an expression of limited cerebral processing ability, Harry’s main hobby is standing or lying in doorways when people are moving around.  That is, once he has recovered from the excitement of human movement.  I’ve stopped talking to him as I walk around, as this tends to induce an erroneous assumption that (a) I like him and (b) I’m going to play with him.  I don’t want to let him down, so I even avoid eye-contact. No, I tell a lie – it’s not about letting him down, It’s just that I can’t stand the stupid and needy look on his face as he starts to breathe heavily and blocks my passage with his fat knuckle head, his tail beating against the walls and doors in unrequited adoration. (As a nice aside, he actually injured his tail within a week of living with us, because he was so unused to wagging it so much.  We laughed about how we’d “broke the dog by making him too happy”, but then I discovered the £100 excess we had to pay the vet and the tale lost some of its charm.)

 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I completely neglect him, though.  Now and again he gets my attention in an affectionate way for a minute or two; and I do walk him.  Picking up dog poo is obviously new to me (well, not totally new, as I used to pick it up as a kid – on the end of a stick, of course – and throw it at friends) but I haven’t found the experience as distasteful as I’d feared.  In cold weather, there’s something comforting about handling a freshly delivered hot one.  In cold weather, the ones he leaves in the garden solidify and subsequently become a joy to pick up.  The only times that this job becomes truly distasteful is when he does a soft one in long grass.  That takes a bit of effort.  So, no, overall I don’t mind picking up his poo, but I think I might need to start doing so using a plastic bag in future, like everyone else does.

 

Here’s a dog-characteristic that I’ll never get used to:  I have a deep-seated personal problem with the noise that people make while eating.  I’m sure I’ve moaned before about noisy bastards in the cinema, slurping their 2-litre cokes and chewing open-mouthed through their bin-bag sized packets of crisps.  Those sounds are like aural water-boarding to me.  So you can imagine how I react to the dog.  For my own sanity I stay clear of the kitchen when he’s eating in there, but then he’ll come into the lounge and spend five minutes licking his jowls, while I tear at the wallpaper until my fingernails bleed and make howling noises in a desperate attempt to escape – something you’d expect the dog to do, but never does.

 

On first getting him, someone quoted one of those meaningless and absurd nuggets of statistical nonsense which purported to claim that owning a dog makes people “70%” happier”.  Well, Harry has had that effect on the rest of the family – or approximately at least, given that I don’t have a fucking “Happiness thermometer” to measure it.  But as far as I’m concerned, the bloody mutt has given me just one thing of significance:  a reason to write a blog again after all this time.