An Early Contender for poop of the year.

(note: the title is a fairly literal explanation on what is about to be revealed below, so please feel free to skip this one if you don’t feel that it is in your best interests to hear about such things. I won’t be offended, but I am feeling pretty good about my recent movement, and I feel I have to share. It’s the three cans of strong Euro-booze I have recently imbibed.)

I have, of late been finishing an essay about national cultures of Empire. It wasn’t an especially long essay, but it is for my last year of my degree, so it has carried some importance. So I have been not going to bed before midnight at the earliest for the last few days. I also have a full time job and a wife with an even fuller time job and a toddler to look after. I also have the housework, and telly watching and enjoying my Christmas present (from my ever-wonderful wife) of Netflix to play with.

(The films I have seen so far on Netflix include;

• Hobbit 3; Battle of the endless CGI armies and what the fuck is Billy Connolly doing there, and where the fuck did those goats come from and do the giant worms from Tremors really need the fucking money? I tried really hard to like it, but in the end I couldn’t. It was a really painful end to the LOTR series – and I really did love the first three. Hobbity bollocks (™ S Platt)
• Sin City 2; Eva Green’s boobies, look at them, there they are, wet and in swimming pools and everything, and Christ is this film still going on? It sagged. From the start to the bit where Christopher Lloyd pops us and then returned to sagging until the end credits. But hey, here’s Eva Green’s boobies, so shut up and watch it. By The way, Good god have you seen Frank Miller’s recent (ish – I’m no respecter of quick cultural response) Superman art? The one where his GIANT PENIS is bulging under his red pants? You can’t not see it, Superman’s flying about beating baddies, and his GIANT PENIS is clearly seen behind his tighty reddies.I remember reading that Frank Miller said that comics shouldn’t be too much about realism, ‘they work best as the flamboyant fantasies they are’ (it’s on his Wikipedia page if you want to look it up and show how I misquote things). I figure that we all know what Frank Miller’s ‘flamboyant fantasies’ are now. You think his previously slightly more subtle but now explosive conservative leanings may be over compensating? You remember in the Watchmen movie where Dr Manhatten’s giant wang is constantly on screen, swinging happily around and you can’t not watch it? Well he was naked and blue and 30 foot tall and he wasn’t Superman and in the original book Dave Gibbons didn’t make a big deal of it, it was just that as a godlike metahuman that existed simultaneously at all temporal points of his own life, he didn’t feel the need for boxer shorts. They were not really relevant to him anymore. I understand that I may well be just a supressed Englishman (telling a tale about his poop) with barely an outie and an inability to admire the wonder male human phallus (it is, to be fair, bloody ugly), but I’m pretty sure that any planet saving action Supes does can be done without needing to see his GIANT PENIS. Good grief, Frank.
• Thor 2.; The Etc, Etc, Etc. Meh.)

All of these are, in my brother’s immortal words, ‘time thieves’. So sleeping and having a healthy diet and all these other fairly essential things necessary for general bodily maintenance have taken a bit of a back seat. I have been surviving on apples and vitamin C supplements. This has played havoc with my, normally fairly active, bowel movement adventures. They have recently been unusually small and bouldery, and left me with the feeling that more and better things are to come. Well the other day, I had, as I have mentioned in the title, a really satisfying, world class poop.

It was a slight struggle – you want a fight, but not a pyrrhic victory; sooner or later all that pushing takes all the joy out of it, makes it feel like actual work, and will eventually rupture something and leave you with an embarrassing trip to the doctors – but suddenly the struggle resulted in an endless and endlessly satisfying mass falling out of me. It didn’t stop. I’m pretty sure there were some rusk debris in there. They came in large and small and soft and crumbly and hard formats. They squeezed and splattered and slurped (onomatopoeia, you can’t beat it when you’re telling a really unsavoury tale) out of me. I must have lost half a stone in ten minutes. It was joyous. After a while, things did start to calm down, but then there were some wee (as in small) aftershocks. Normally, this would indicate that there are further battles ahead, that you’re not done and before long you’re just pushing and farting and producing nothing of note except the continual need to wipe, but this was more like the final showers of a firework show. The curtain call and a bout of well-deserved self-applause. There was a satisfying wipe to follow, enough to make sure that you know you’re doing a good job, but nothing too sticky, where you’re tearing through endless paper, only to be downhearted by the constant return of a smear you can’t leave. Despite the obvious oxymoron of the idea of passing faecal matter as a cleansing act, I felt clean and refreshed and sparkly like a really good tooth brushing after a day of eating candy floss.

I leapt and pranced back to my desk with a beatific smile spread across my silly face, like a Disney rabbit doing an unwitting Princess’ menial labour and carried on with a solid day of avoiding real work. All in all, a great poo, and, as I say, an early but major contender for poop of the year.