8am: banana, peppermint tea.

8.30am: mild explosion followed by another firmer one at 8.45

1pm: collection of small greasy stools at Liverpool Street Station en route to audition for Plan B's latest video.

2pm: ginger and apple juice and half a cream cheese roll

3.30pm: arrival and immediate departure from Plan B audition on being met by a swarm of young dancers spilling out of the Soho studio, all of them clutching a sheet of A4 with a number on it.

4pm: leisurely return to Hackney and no more emissions for the rest of the day.

8am 2 bowel explosions; coffee.

12pm 1 more (explosion)

1pm cheese and ham sandwich on brown bread and bottle of sparkling water in Cafe Nero, Brixton.

3pm a collection of small loose stools. Perhaps it's lactose intolerance and not IBS. Or even Celiac Disease?

4pm Knotted sensation all afternoon

8pm Still not eaten. Glad I'm not doing The Poof Downstairs in the Fringe after all, I'd only have to keep leaving the stage to do collections of small stools.

Sunday 25th July

8am: 1 banana, porridge, peppermint tea

1.30pm: Omelet. Bread.

3pm: two bowel openings while at gym

6pm: cheese and coleslaw sandwich

9pm: lentils, vegetables and rice

Monday 26th July

8am: 1 poo on rising

8.15am: 1 tea, banana, porridge

8.45am: 2

more poos

12 noon: cappuccino and muffin

1pm: 2 poos in quick succession (10 minute gap)

6pm: Cheese sandwich (white bread) and chips

9pm: small amount of rice, lentils and vegetables.

stewed rhubarb, camomile tea

Tuesday 27th July

8am: tea, banana, porridge

8.30am: runny poo

10.30am: again

1.45pm: cheese sandwich, crisps, chocolate

3pm: diarrhea

5pm: yoghurt and banana smoothie, piece of cake

9pm: bread and cheese, rice, broccoli, nuts and tofu

Wednesday 28th July

6.45am: peppermint tea, banana
9am: Small loose bowel movement (not urgent)
9.30am: Cappuccino & muffin

12 noon: small, loose stools, but no urgency to go

(same with earlier opening)
2.30pm: cheese & ham sandwich on brown bread, packet of crisps,

sparkling water
5pm: cheese roll (white bread)

9.30pm: rice & butter beans in tomato sauce, apple

Thursday 29th July

6.45am: peppermint tea, apple
9am: omelet, bread roll & butter

10.10am: urgency to go after 10 mins on running machine in gym

(many small loose stools)

10.25: urgency to leave running machine again,

though hardly anything came out.

1.30pm: cheese sandwich on brown bread

(on train to London Fields from Liverpool

Street Station), piece of white chocolate.

6pm: chicken leg, roast potatoes, salad

8pm: a crumpet

10.30pm: bread, cheese, salad

Friday 30th July

8am: poo (normal)

8.15am: black coffee

9am: several small loose stools

10am: small stringy poo

The Cheap Cosmetic Surgery Capital of the World

Almost exactly two months ago today I was sitting in a cafe in Silom, the financial (also, some of it, the gay) district of Bangkok. The area‘s been in the international spotlight recently because the Red Shirt protestors set up an encampment just on the edge of it. A complete stranger came up to me. He said his name was Nut and he asked me if I would accompany him to his skin clinic. He was, he said, feeling a little apprehensive. Although only twenty-six, he had already had two operations on his nose. Nut is Thai, and like many Asians he wants to look like a Westerner. Westerners have larger noses than Asians. They also have lighter skin, hence the craze for skin lightening creams. You go into Boots in Silom to buy a moisturizer or facial scrub and unless you scrutinize the product carefully you will open it at home to find that it contains skin-lightening agents. Nut showed me photographs on his phone of his previous, pre-operation noses. I’m not sure I could tell the difference between any of them. It’s all relative, after all. Asians, to Westerners, have small noses generally. Some are flatter or wider or thinner, but they’re all small. Minor gradations may be discernible to fellow Asians but to the Westerner small is small. Nut’s nose had been made taller by a sort of hammering from within. No cutting had been necessary, just the insertion of a miniature club and the subsequent bashing outwards of the nasal cavity. Nut, though, was not happy with his taller nose and returned to his doctor in Silom to have cuts made either side of each nostril so that the skin cold be tucked in and sewn up. This resulted in a narrower nose. When I accompanied him on his third visit he extracted his iphone and showed the doctor a photograph. “There,” he told him. “That one. That’s the nose I want.”

During the ensuing discussion the doctor showed us other examples of nose jobs on his computer, and as he scrolled down through a sequence of ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots Nut began to emit little yelps of surprise. “Oh,” he said, “there’s Pon! Oh, and there’s Ta! And there’s Ton!” The patients were mostly friends and regulars at a renowned local nightclub. There they all were with their taller and narrower noses or their larger eyes - another operation popular with Asians being double eyelid surgery, or ‘enhancement of the Asian upper eyelid crease.' This again turns them into Westerners. All very odd, actually. I’ve never heard of Westerners having their eyelids messed around with so that they resemble Asians ('slitty eye surgery').

Towards the end of this consultation it dawned on me that I was being talked about and pointed at. If I had something done to my eyes, a kind of sucking out of the fatty deposits beneath them, I would look ten years younger, I was told. Oh no, I couldn’t, I said. Only 50,000 baht (about 700 pounds), said Nut. Oh, is that all? I said. Well, in that case… After Nut had had some quick botox injections (painful, he said) we left the surgery, passing boys peddling ‘sex dvds’ to tourists. Exhausted, sweaty soldiers slouched against shuttered shop fronts and gazed idly on.

Rude Boys Go to Westminster (working title)

I have been prevented from sitting at the kitchen table and writing because there is cat vomit blocking the way. If Nicotine thinks that by throwing up between me and my writing surface she is going to stop me working on my treatment for “The Rude Boys go to Westminster” then she’s got another thing coming.

“The Rude Boys go to Westminster” is an alternative reality TV programme in which a group of handpicked lowlifes exchange places with politicians and spend a couple of weeks running the country. David Cameron swaps places with me and finds himself having to tip-toe from his attic room every morning, creep past the bedroom wherein lies the sleeping landlady and pick his prime ministerial way through the cat puke punctuating the kitchen floor.

V.O: Clearing up Nicotine vomit in the early hours of the morning isn’t the kind of thing David Cameron’s used to doing.
CUT TO: David at the G20 Summit, looking bemusedly on as Angela Merkel cracks a joke, Berlusconi cracks his face, Barack beams and Sarkozy slaps everyone on the back.

But there’s something more pressing than this: no one is reading my blog. You can’t even find it in search engines. According to my research it can apparently take a few weeks for your blog to start appearing in Google. But it nearly is a few weeks and it’s still not there. I’ve consulted blogger Help and I’ve done what Help advised me to do, which is to send the link to my friends. Friends have clicked on it. Some have actually read it. I’ve even left a comment on someone else’s blog, gawd help me (or rather Help help me), but only because Help told me that the way to get your blog noticed is by leaving comments on other people’s blogs. The trouble is, though, that no one has commented upon my comment. Perhaps it was a non sequitur. Whatever it was I am now stuck with this problem: my posts are being shot out into the blogosphere but remaining for the most part unread. They are also missing Google by several miles.
Perhaps what I should do is regard this blog as a private journal that I’ve accidentally left lying around in the bathroom. It’s just a matter of time before someone chances upon it and has the temerity to open it. But this approach is fraught with danger. If I assume no one is going to read it then I will apply neither taste nor discretion to the writing, and then if they do read it (in the bathroom or anywhere else) and find themselves lampooned or bitched about I will end up being sued for libel. Or on the streets.
Although I’ve mentioned my l-lady and various individuals a few times here already, I have so far gone to great pains not to bitch, being aware that even if I am not consciously bitching it might come across as bitching. Which takes me back to The Westminster Fight Club for Rude Boys. I mean, sorry, Rude Boys go to Westminster.

The Snip

I met an acquaintance I hadn’t seen for a few years. ‘What are you up to?’ she asked. ‘I’m waiting to be cut,’ I replied. She looked blank. I explained my fear of being made a victim of George Osborne’s fiscal sadism. ‘Oh, I see,’ she said, ‘I thought for a minute that you were waiting to have some operation. Like the snip.’ We laughed, it not occurring to us that we are all, in a sense, waiting for the snip, and if not the snip then an operation that will involve snipping. Danny Alexander, young enough to be my grandson, announced more snips the other day. I read the list before going to bed and slept very well as none of his snippings involved me. 



But I can’t talk about politics. I don’t know the language. I can’t talk about landladies either because they’d kill me. She’s gone away for a few days, my l-lady, leaving me to feed Nicotine. Which is not a euphemism for my smoking habit (I don’t have one) but an allusion to the cutting up of M&S organic chicken and the feeding of it to a seventeen-year-old cat called Nicotine who has reached that grand old age precisely because she’s been on a rigorous life-long diet of bran biscuits and responsibly sourced meats. But at least I don’t have to pay any rent. Well, not until the landlady discovers my blogging activities and her inclusion therein. Oh, let’s throw caution to the wind and assume that the l-lady will be delighted to find she is being blogged about. After all, there’s only one thing worse than being blogged about, and that’s not being blogged about.

This is my sixth post and I still haven’t found a subject about which I can safely blog. There is IBS, of course, but is irritable bowel syndrome a suitable subject for blogging? To get to the point: have I got IBS? Does anyone, apart from me, care if I’ve got IBS? If I feature in the list of cuts in today’s budget and all I am left with is IBS and blogging, then what hope is there? An IBS blog. That’s where the hope lies. Unless the blog is cut as well.

Last Sunday I came perilously close to having a bowel explosion in the middle of Dalberg Road, Brixton. It would have been the fifth such incident in my lifetime, previous explosions having occurred in the queue for the boys' toilet in Mrs. Long's class at St. Winefride's Convent School circa 1968, in a disused outhouse on Battersea Rise, behind a stack of garbage cans outside a swanky Manhattan apartment block (significantly only a few weeks after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre) and, most recently, on platform 9 of Waterloo Station, where I found myself ducking down behind a workers’ hut one cold evening in 2001 and not so much opening my bowels as letting them have their say. Displaying great quickness of thought, I concealed the spreading lake of diarrhea beneath copies of The Evening Standard and Metro. The following morning I had to pass through the station again. I noticed, with a quiet satisfaction, that platform 9 had been cordoned off.

Russell Brand and other irritants

I didn’t want to write that name here. It gets quite enough exposure as it is. But I’ve just glanced to my left and seen a copy of The Guardian Weekend Magazine, its cover emblazoned with the image of the one and only, the over-exposed, RB. Which led me to think, very briefly, this: how has RB got to the position he’s got to when everyone I meet (including myself, having met myself a few years ago in Sainsbury’s) can’t stand him? Presumably there must be people out there who like him, but their paths haven’t crossed mine. A similar thing is going on with David Cameron. He’s got to be prime minister, his party having won twenty-six per cent or whatever it was of the national vote, and yet I don’t personally know anyone who voted for him. Adolf Hitler’s another one. Got to a very high position of responsibility, yet I never met anyone who liked him or admitted to voting for him. Presumably with Brand, though, the public, his fans, put him where he is today. Unless the whole thing is a mistake. He just happened, for example, to be in a film (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) that was a hit. The producers of said hit assumed that because RB was in said hit then he himself was a hit. Doesn’t necessarily follow. Another possibility is that audiences generally found RB intensely irritating but simultaneously enjoyed being irritated by him. It’s just possible. Even more possible with Cameron and Hitler.

Some old people, one is told, are only kept alive by their own complaining. “If she didn’t have anything to moan about she’d die,” they used to say about my Granny (they didn’t, actually, but I’ve got to support my claims somehow). My landlady (who shows no signs of ageing) is one of the most enthusiastic complainers I know and yet she’s recently decided to exchange the bustle of Brixton for an isolated trailer home near Taunton. ‘You’ll go mad,’ I said to her. ‘I won’t,’ she replied, ‘I’m an only child, I’m not a sociable animal, I can’t wait to be alone in the country. It’ll be lovely.’ ‘But you’ll have nothing to complain about,’ I said, ‘It’s what keeps you going. You relish confrontation.’ Similarly, although I complain about my landlady (and practically everyone else too) I probably enjoy complaining about her, just as she enjoys complaining about me. Sometimes to my face.

So, RB, Hitler, David Cameron and, to a lesser extent, my landlady and I are like that. They are irritants we cannot do without. Without which we would die. Absurd. Next topic. Instant messaging and how it’s got me in its grip.