Recently dining with a friend from Paris, we were through the main course and were starting cheese when she mentioned ball-sacks. There was of course a perfectly logical explanation as she needed to buy underpants for her eldest son, but then following her line of conversation to its rational conclusion, she needed to speak about knickers for her daughters. This is when it got technical and purchase of said items had to take account of Toxic Shock.
So far unperturbed I reached for the cheese as the explanation of Toxic Shock Syndrome, to give it it’s complete name, was outlined in detail. It is basically a bacterial infection sometimes caused by women using tampons overnight but also other devices such as menstrual cups, contraceptive sponges or diaphragms. By now I had a piece of cheese and biscuit in my mouth. Somehow I could not bring myself to eat it but neither could I spit it out. I had to sit there and start to munch very slowly and finally swallow. The rest of the cheese remained uneaten. It is amazing what now counts as polite Parisian conversation.
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Penny Wong has been making headlines recently as she scoots around the Pacific. She was recently in Vanuatu and a local official gave her a piglet as a sign of friendship and peace. The recipient is, there and then, meant to accept the gift by cudgelling the piglet to death. I am not sure if Penny had a cudgel with her, as perhaps she could not get it through airport security, but she just patted the piglet instead. The youth of today has become soft.
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Some friends have recently been rafting down the Franklin River in Tasmania for 10 days. The policy of the guides is to leave nothing behind not even one’s faeces so they had to shit in a bag. How you do this is maybe the subject of a How-to guide or a SAS training manual, but possibilities include either holding the bag yourself or get someone to hold it for you. Price and Ovenden were very coy as to the process. Either way what happens on tour stays on tour. All I know is that the bags were put in an ammunition box and rafted back to base. They drew straws as to who emptied the ammo box. No wonder they wore wetsuits.
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I’m a bit of a podcast junkie and recently delving into the gold mine that is BBC Sounds, I listened to a podcast on the slogans of the Chinese Communist Party. My favourite was ‘Have less children more pigs.’ Eminently sensible. Another gem was ‘Tight trousers is a bourgeois habit.’ They must have been listening to my father, who insisted I wear boxer shorts at senior school. There was a slight problem as I was the only boy wearing boxers in a school of 1400 boys and my middle name is Gay. Fifteen years later and everyone was wearing boxers. You would never know I was a fashionista.
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Disappearing down another writer’s rabbit-hole I read a webpage on inappropriate adverts from the past. In the 1930s, the Tart-Chestnut Company in the USA had a new brand called ‘Big Tits Potato Chips.’ My favourite though was an advert from the 1950s with the tagline ‘Blow in her face and she will follow you anywhere.’ Now before you jump into the sewer, the product was cigarettes and the man was blowing smoke into a woman’s face.