Does anyone have a contact for the Farrelly brothers?

I ask, because if you do, you might consider sending them the following as a treatment for one of their forthcoming films. I swear every single word is true.

Last Saturday afternoon, I started to feel a bit peaky. I was tired and listless but put this down to having had rather a good lunch with my brother in law and a few glasses of a rather excellent Provencal rosé. And I had spent a hard week decorating the living room, working pretty much non- stop from 7.30 am to 8pm so I forgave myself for dozing, somewhat rudely, on his sofa. I felt no better when I got home however and by the time the poker players arrived at 7.30pm I was starting to realise that this might be a bit more than just tiredness. I was feeling, well, ill.

I knew I wasn’t well when I started to lose money. I don’t lose money at poker. By 8.30pm I was in for £120 and couldn’t seem to find a way to get back into the game, so I sat quietly not really taking much notice of the cards, feeling steadily worse and worse until a little before midnight. At that point, I got up, poured myself a glass of water and suddenly felt as cold as Titus Oates did about an hour after he popped out. I sat down and immediately began a full on rigor: my teeth and jaws clattering like a train over tracks and my body going into spastic shakes. I have to say that this did not unduly bother me for it is my standard reaction to infection. As soon as the bugs bite, my body temperature shoots up and I shake like a bastard until my anterior hypothalamus catches up, works out just what the fuck is going on and re-sets itself.

That said, the blokes round the table took a slightly different view. I looked up from the A/9 off suit I had just been dealt (my best hand for hours) and saw a look of fear and bewilderment in their eyes. They had obviously never seen anything like it and were not at all convinced that this was not the immediate precursor to my death. ‘Are you all right?’ said one.

‘No. Feel like shit. Let’s play cards!’ I replied, and, bless them, they did, even though for the next hour I continued to sit amongst them – or rather move amongst them for my convulsions were so severe at times they thought I was going for a walk – and make a variety of rather terrifying noises. I am pleased to say, by the way, my A/9 held up and I won back £98 of my money.

The next day a couple of texts arrived. They went like this:

‘So glad you didn’t die. Jo wouldn’t have let me play again if you had.’

‘I was all for beating you to death to put you out of your misery, but they talked me out of it.’

It’s poker. You expect it.

By Sunday, it was obvious what the problem was: I had picked up some kind of infection in my lower gastric tract and I was really, really suffering. Fortunately, the Gods of sick had decided not to give me the both ends treatment but throughout Sunday and Monday it was impossible for me to be more than five seconds away from the bog, which was fine by me because to be honest I felt so disgustingly wretched that I only wanted to be in bed anyway. Feeling only a bit better on Tuesday, by which I mean I was now sometimes as much as an hour between my rusty water boarding, I decided that I ought to go to the GP to rule out anything major, so I made an appointment.

Before I go on, there is one contextual detail you need to be aware of: anything of detail less than six feet away from my face becomes progressively more blurry the closer you bring it until anything requiring fine motor skills close up also requires halogen lighting and precision engineered optical assistance. To assist me I have two pairs of glasses, one at work, and one at home so that I should never be without a pair. Needless to say however, that the ones at home are always upstairs when I am downstairs and vice versa.

So, it is Tuesday morning and Helen is going to drive me to the GPs. I trundle downstairs, still stinking from three days of the most profuse sweating, and drop myself into the passenger seat of the Peugeot. As we drive away, Helen says to me: ‘Have you got the sense to be able to listen to an instruction?’

I nodded.

‘I’m going to drop you off after your appointment but go straight on to take Isabelle to Toddler group so I need you to do a really simple thing for me. You know it is Dad’s birthday tomorrow?

I nod.

‘Well I have made him a chocolate and hazelnut swirl cake. I need to ice it later and I am going to use up that chocolate fondant icing I made too much of when I made Isabelle’s cake. There is a freezer bag of it defrosting on the draining board. All I need you to do is decant it into a bowl and put it into the fridge when it’s ready. Is that all right? Can you do that?’

I nodded.

At the GP’s, the nice young lady (all of 16), re-assured me that I just had to ride it out but said that just to be on the safe side she would like to collect a stool sample, for which she passed me a small pot. I examined it to discover it had an aperture about the size of polo mint and contained a small shovel/spoon thing that would have been most useful for any Borrower who wanted to knock up a bit of concrete.

‘Best pop to the kitchen and get a ladle’, I said, ‘It’ll be more use’.

‘Try with that.’ She said.

Returning to Berry Cottage, (Helen having duly driven off to take Isabelle to her Toddler group), I realised that my timing had been impeccable. I had managed to avoid any unpleasantness at the Dr’s but the hour (make that ‘five seconds’ for that was all the notice I was getting) was at hand, so, armed with my Borrower’s trowel, but not with my glasses for they, as usual, were on the wrong floor of the house, I plunged into hell.

What happened next was recorded by seismologists. Indeed, there were some that thought that that thing under Yellow Stone Park that has been threatening to go pop for forty thousand years had finally blown, that a generation of Pacific North Western Americans had been wiped out and the planet was in for a period of serious climactic change. I actually heard my neighbour in her garden say, ‘What on earth was that?’

I simply cannot begin to describe the volume, the pressure nor the stench, and given that I had had my hand ‘round the back’ (having realised that the trowel really was of no use whatsoever) in the hope of directing something into the absurdly small pot, the direct hit on my hand and the splash back on my undercarriage meant that I was, frankly, in a mess. I looked at the tiny hand basin in the down stairs loo and realised that it was of no use to me whatsoever, so I shuffled out of the downstairs loo like a half blind penguin, trousers and pants round my ankles ,my arse, my hand, the pot and most of my clothes covered in shit. I shuffled into the kitchen and thought,

‘I’ll use the sink. It’s nice and big and I can sit in it. I just need lots of clear space to work. Now what’s that on the draining board?’


David Izod