World Toilet Day

From the newspaper box I took an old copy of the Cape Times and went outside, closing the door behind me. I didn’t want the dog following and making a nuisance of herself. It was going to be a warm day, the sun was already high, and I was glad to be wearing a hat.

The indigenous bush has grown up on the adjoining plot to form an unkempt fynbos garden. A path snakes through the low but dense vegetation to a clearing near the centre of the property. I passed a tortoise coming my way, and then disturbed a family of francolin trying to take a dust bath. 

In the clearing I set the business supplement to one side, then opened the main section in the middle and spread it on the ground. Stepping out of my Crocs, I removed shorts and underpants and draped them over a bastard olive. Then I moved onto the newspaper and squatted down.

I didn’t have more than a few moments to wait. A single fart heralded the immanent arrival, my sphincter relaxed, and the faecal serpent slithered from my colon, where it had been waiting with growing impatience. Beyond my dangling genitals I could see it settling itself on the newspaper in a rich brown coil of potter’s clay. The familiar odour of my excrement filled my nostrils in a way that I found extravagantly offensive. 

Well, I thought as I tore a strip of paper off the Business Report, that was easy enough. But, directing a stream of yellow urine away from the Cape Times and enjoying the feeling of relief as my bladder emptied, I accepted that it was time to deal with the consequences.

Wiping a hairy arse can at times prove to be a messy affair, even when using good quality two-ply. Newsprint is nowhere near as absorbent as toilet paper and tends to smear rather than clean. I would hate having to contend with this mess every time I had a bowel movement.

Fully clothed once more, I was obliged to deal with the next essential stage of the ritual, which was to dispose of the repugnant product lying there on the ground. I lifted the nearest edge of the Ccape Times, which was a little soggy, and folded it over in order to cover the heap. Then the back edge forward and the two sides in. I picked up the parcel, weighing it and feeling its warmth, and realised with annoyance that I should have first spread the Business Report, ready to receive the wrapped waste matter. Now I had to set it to one side, spread the supplement, and fold the Times in on itself once more before bundling it in the additional sheets.

Back at the house I dropped the bundle into the black bag lining the dustbin and replaced the lid. Washing my hands in the bathroom, I congratulated myself on having accomplished exactly what I had set out to do. Now it was time for quiet reflection.

Why had I chosen to relieve myself in this manner, when there was a working flush toilet in a hygienic condition at my disposal? Why go outside, crouch down so close to my own dung, wipe myself with rough newspaper, and then be obliged to wrap the stuff up and dispose of it? What had prompted this unusual behaviour?

It had been on learning that November 19 was designated by the United Nations as World Toilet Day. I was horrified, but not that all surprised, to discover that 4.2 billion people live without "safely managed sanitation" and around 673 million people practice open defecation.

When it comes to the basic bodily functions, I thought to myself, the gulf between them and us disappears. Whether we are black or white, rich or poor, a CEO or a labourer, a man or woman, we are all subjected to the same ignominy every day of our lives. This is what should serve to remind us that we are not a cut above the rest of humanity.

Of course there is no doubt that a clean toilet makes it so much easier to delude ourselves. To an extent, the seat cuts us off from the reality beneath us, and washing our hands helps to cleanse our memory of the stench. The experience is reduced to a minor private ordeal that we have no desire to dwell on. Some of us can even pretend it doesn’t happen at all!

Before long I was imagining a slow train ride chugging through open country. In my fantasy I spotted any number of well-known people huddling bare bummed over their little piles of stinking muck. There was Donald Trump taking up position on the stars and stripes, and the Pope a little way off, desperately searching for his ass amongst all those whites. An old girl with her dress about her waist and fleshy pink bum just inches above the ground was identifiable as the Queen of England by the huge hat she was wearing. And who was this coming into view? Our very own Jacob Zuma! Crouched low, he was ringed about by several large women, and behind them were a couple of dozen youngsters, all engaged in the same smelly activity.

This scatological vision left me chuckling but I soon began to examine it in a more serious light. Could it be that by requiring every middle class citizen, along with the captains of industry, the politicians, the church leaders, the academics and the artists to regularly squat, it might be possible to improve this dysfunctional society we live in? By getting them to defecate on a sheet of newspaper, and then making them dispose of it, would surely take some of the arrogance out of their swagger and induce a little empathy for the millions of poor buggers who are denied decent sanitation.

The idea struck me as nothing less than inspired, and that is why I went out there and performed the ritual as a kind of experiment. And do I now feel more humble for having shat on the ground like an animal? Well, yes, most certainly. That is why I am making an appeal to all those who read this to set aside half an hour on World Toilet Day, the 19th of November, in order to do likewise. I sincerely believe that by squatting together we can make a difference.

(If no garden space is available, I suggest the garage as an alternative. Failing that, it will have to be in the house, preferably on a tiled floor.)

To view my longer work as an author, you can find me on Smashwords here.

Varieties of Sexual Experience

In January 2013 the editors at news24 rejected this piece. A pity, because I had hoped to provoke a response from the community there, which is largely white, racist, Christian and homophobic.

When I was an adolescent I worried a lot about developing into a ‘homo,’ as gays were referred to in those days. Even in my late teens I sometimes construed my awkwardness and lack of success with girls as an indication that I was a latent pansy. It took several experiences before I really got a taste for female flesh and stopped fretting about my orientation.

It bothered me that although I had never detested homosexuals, I had dreaded becoming one of them. Why? Well, I suppose it was largely due to social conditioning and the stigma attached to ‘unnatural’ behaviour. But what was ‘natural,’ I asked myself. In order to find out, I began to make a study of sexual practices.

My older brother pointed me in the direction of the Bible, saying, “Leviticus. There’s some good stuff in Leviticus.”

When I went to Leviticus I did indeed find a list of prohibitions that was informative. Look, you don’t prohibit folks from doing something unless they are inclined to do it whenever they get the opportunity. Leviticus was telling me that men were having sex not just with other men, but also with their mothers, sisters and daughters. And furthermore, the dirty bastards were at the livestock! My studies revealed that from time immemorial men have been forcing themselves on just about every domesticated animal in the farmyard. And women haven’t been averse to getting down on all fours for dogs, goats, pigs, apes … you name it.

The more I studied the subject, the more astonished I became. It was vast and it was bizarre, and I soon realised that our excessive preoccupation with sex was the result of our ability to imagine and to be turned on by images and associations. It was the faculty of imagination that could cause a housewife to suddenly blush as she cleaned a handsome cucumber under the running tap. Or for a man to find himself busy in a make-believe bedroom not three seconds after his secretary had bent down to open the bottom draw of the filing cabinet.

“My ex used to get me to stand on the table and urinate into a bucket on the floor when he blew a whistle,” one woman told me as I tethered her to some heavy furniture. “That’s what really sent him into orbit.”

What my ongoing research, as well as personal experience over the years has revealed is that much of what used to be regarded as deviant, aberrant, or a perversion, is nothing of the sort, but quite normal, and an acceptable step on the way to achieving gratification.

Take oral sex, for example. Fellatio and cunnilingus are now considered standard practice and no more of an abomination than eating ice cream off a cone. And what’s wrong with anal sex, if it’s a comfortable fit?

Then there’s proxy sex, which ranges from various forms of masturbation to intercourse with a life-size doll, all three orifices accessible. For thousands of years men have been thrusting their members into narrow openings of every conceivable kind. Ever tried a fridge door? Cool. And women haven’t been shy to insert anything that could serve as a dildo, from candles, carrots and cucumbers to bottles, bones and bananas. Anything that vaguely resembles a protrusion. As a youth, I once called upon the help of a paw-paw to ravish Playmate of the Year for 1968. She was hanging on the back of the toilet door. The fruit was somewhat ripe, however, and all too soon turned to pulp, which resulted in coitus interruptis. Damn frustrating.

Then there’s all that role-playing stuff that usually involves some aspect of BDSM. BDSM is a combination of bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism. Ropes and whips and chains and handcuffs and blindfolds and masks and leather boots and straps, and military regalia and black underwear. People strut about and bark instructions, or whine and plead for mercy, and assume undignified positions. It’s all rather ridiculous but if it gives the participants an added thrill to their sex lives, what’s wrong with it? As long as it’s SSC (safe, sane and consensual)?

When I got to necrophilia I kind of drew a line and lost interest, though. Man, if you can get intimate with a corpse, nothing is safe from you, animate or inanimate. Those chemicals that get pumped into your brain are going to make you raving mad and the only way to get you right is castration.

But let’s get back to homosexuality. It seems to me, now that I have acquainted myself with many varieties of sexual experience, that the desire for sexual intimacy with one of your own gender is entirely normal and no more immoral than, say, a woman giving her boyfriend a blowjob. In fact, I suspect that most people would be bi-sexual if the present social prejudices were to disappear. And that’s not to deny there would still be significant numbers who preferred to be strictly hetero or homo.

If I am right about this, then it means that the majority of us are being forced to repress part of our sexuality. I, personally, have been deprived of a whole lot of sensual pleasure by a conservative section of society that still has the power to decide what is moral and natural. I resent the influence these people continue to exert, and would urge other 'deviants' and 'perverts' to follow their preferences and flaunt their difference in the faces of the moral zealots, who are more often than not religious fundamentalists to boot.

To view my longer work as an author, you can find me on Smashwords here.

Jack and Jill

The grandmother was left to care for five children after her daughter succumbed to the disease. Her old age pension and the child grants enabled them to survive in a state of poverty. Her RDP house had a cold water tap but it had run dry more than a year ago. It was getting late in the day when she instructed the two eldest children to fetch a bucket of water from the well at the top of the hill. All of the villagers would have preferred a well at the bottom of the hill but were told that the Councillor’s nephew needed to drill an extra 400 metres to make the project worth while. Jack and Jill climbed the hill to where the tank stood next to the borehole pump. There they encountered three men who had been smoking tik. These men beat Jack with a stick and their fists and then threw him down the steepest side of the hill. Jill was chased and caught. When he regained his senses Jack found himself lying in a bush and bleeding from a head wound he had sustained in the fall. Up he got and managed to stagger back to his grandmother’s house. Being concussed he was unable to tell her what had happened or where his sister was. The old lady had no first aid dressings and bandages so she tore up a paper potato sack, soaked it in some vinegar and wrapped Jack’s head with it. Then she went to the neighbours to summon help. A man with a phone called the cops. Because the one police van had a puncture and no spare, and the other had gone to town to fetch supplies for the station commander’s spaza shop, they were only able to respond the following day. By then the villagers had discovered Jill’s body at the bottom of the hill. All were in agreement that Jill would still be alive if the well had not been drilled at the top of the hill. The tender price should have been inflated by some other means, like double invoicing or falsifying the geological test results. (From Nursery Rhymes and Fairy Tales.)

To view my longer work as an author, you can find me on Smashwords here.

How I Saved South Africa

The first thing I did was to declare a state of emergency. That freed me up to get things done in a hurry. I assembled a team of experts to provide me with reliable information and advice. I went on TV and radio to tell the nation what I was going to do to get the country working and on the path to prosperity.

The most pressing matter to deal with was the Covid 19 crisis.

Henry's First Day at the Dockyard

"There are nine intervals, either end of each being announced by The Sirens. That makes ten times a day that The Sirens sound." He looked at his watch. "In about half an hour we'll hear the 9.30 siren. That's when we take a half hour tea break."

Henry was puzzled. He was seated behind his new desk in the office that he was to share with Senior Stores Officer Mr Alf Whitehead. Mr Whitehead was standing at the window looking down on the Dockyard through the large expanse of glass.

"But we've been reading the paper, drinking coffee and chatting since I arrived this morning. I don't understand, when do we start work?"

The storeman, a portly man in his early fifties with receding grey hair and an upper lip which, over the years, had been allowed to run wild and was now covered with a huge tangle of overgrown moustache, turned to look at Henry, his face suddenly rendered grim by a veil of non-comprehension. Then the light of understanding returned, he snorted and resumed his contemplation of the naval scene.

"You're very new here. It's quite natural that it will take you a little while to acquire our way of seeing the world. There's a lot to learn. You see, to start with, it doesn't matter what we actually do, it's when we do it. Between 7.30 and 9.30 we work. If we choose to drink a cup of coffee in that interval, then it's work."

"But…" Henry remained nonplussed. "I mean, how do we justify it?"

"Good God, boy! Justify it?! If you can't justify it there's no hope for you. You shouldn't be here. You shouldn't be on the planet." He paused, trying to control his impatience. "Look, if we are drinking coffee it's because we're testing a victual. Commander Wolfaart has complained about the freshness, or staleness, of the instant coffee. We are conducting tests on different batches of Nescafe to determine which one it is that fails to meet naval standards. We are consulting the newspaper in order to find out when that French freighter will be docking in Cape Town - you know how urgently the shipment of submarine parts is required. We are in conversation because I am briefing you on important matters concerning the efficient running of this store. Get it? Really, if you can't justify your existence then you are bereft of imagination. But don't worry, I'm sure you don't fit into that pitiful category. You'll soon pick it up and become adept in…"

This is an extract from The Life of Henry Fuckit, which can be read on my website here.

What is the Memory Project?

Memory Project is my attempt at writing a memoir. Over a period of three or four months in 2016 I listened to a BBC series called ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects.’ The objects were all from the British Museum, starting with a lump of rock that was a Stone Age tool, and ending with a solar-powered lamp with charger. It occurred to me that this could be a way of exploring my memory, using pictures of items as stepping stones. I realised that each item could in turn lead to others, and yet others, exponentially. The objects could include books, photographs, letters, works of art and music. If I didn’t get bored, this project could keep me busy until I kicked the bucket. Here is an example of what I am talking about.

An Mbira

I bought this mbira while on a hitch-hiking trip through Rhodesia in 1976. ‘A member of the lamellaphone family of musical instruments, it consists of a wooden board (often fitted with a resonator) with attached staggered metal tines, and is played by holding the instrument in the hands and plucking the tines with the thumbs.’ (Wikipedia.) My mbira has six tines, but it is common for others to have twenty or more. It is considered to be an African invention and can be traced back for at least 3000 years.

On one occasion as a child of about eight or nine I visited the houseboy squatting before his fire. I found him busy hammering a length of fencing wire on a short piece of steel rail he had scrounged from a friend working on the Railways. Every few minutes he would stop to heat the wire in the flames and then resume pounding it flat. When I asked him what he was doing he said he was making an mbira. About a week later the instrument was completed and I saw that the flattened wire had been cut into lengths to form the tines. For a resonator he used an empty Cobra stoep polish tin. A piece of rubber cut from an inner tube was stretched over the mouth of the tin to close it like a drum skin. I was impressed with his ingenuity and enjoyed listening to him singing and humming as he plucked the tines with his thumb nails. The ‘boy’ in question was Joseph, and I was sad when he resigned after a year or two in order to return to his wife and children in the Native Reserve.

To view my longer work as an author, you can find me on Smashwords here.

Covid 19 and the Albatrosses of Gough Island

On a quiet afternoon in the ward the duty sister approached me and said Matron Sharp wanted to see me. I was to go to her office on the 4^th floor immediately. This was forty years ago and, as I have described in a previous post, (My Affair with Florence Nightingale)I was working as an orderly in A1 Medical Ward at Groote Schuur Hospital. An orderly was an assistant male nurse who occupied the second lowest position in the nursing hierarchy, superior only to a porter. The highest rank in the chain of command was that of Matron, and there were four of them. They were uncompromising disciplinarians who demanded impossibly high standards from those working under them. My face must have looked like I was recently deceased and my hand shook as I knocked on Matron Sharp’s office door.

To my surprise, she didn’t start shouting at me for having left a spoon down some old codger’s gullet, or for over warming a bed pan and burning a patient’s bum. Instead she informed me that the Department of Transport was urgently seeking the services of a suitably qualified person to fill the position of medic and serve as a member of the next team leaving for Gough Island in two weeks’ time.

Because my mouth was hanging open she told me to shut it and stop looking stupid.

“But I’m not a doctor,” I protested. “I’m just an orderly and not even a …”

“Don’t worry. You don’t have to be a doctor. The man you will be replacing is a veterinary assistant who was recruited from the Cavalry Corps in the Army. His only medical experience was with the gelding of horses.”

That is how I got to spend a year on Gough Island as a member of the 26^th seven-man Meteorological Expedition.

Four ornithologists spent the takeover period on the island studying aspects of bird life. They had plenty of birds to choose from. Eight million, in fact, but they confined their study to albatrosses. There are three species breeding on Gough, the Yellow-nosed, the Sooty and the Tristan (Formerly thought to be a Wandering Albatross but now classified as a slightly different species.) Before these ornithologists boarded the ship and returned to Cape Town they approached me with a request. They had noticed the interest I had shown in their work and wondered if I could assist them by ringing some of the Tristan Albatross chicks before they left the nest in a few months’ time.

I agreed, and when there was a break in the weather Ray and I trudged up the mountain and made our way to     the main breeding site. Ray was a member of the contingent of three Met officers and was a keen hiker. We pitched our tent and then went into action. One of us would approach the chick on its nest, grab it and hold it under one arm while clamping its beak shut with his free hand. The other man was then able to position the metal ring around a leg and close it shut with a pair of modified pliers. The bird was released and it climbed back onto its mound of mud, grass and moss.

We ringed about 10 chicks that afternoon and another 20 the following morning before returning to the base. We had spent the night in our tent, protected from a near gale force wind that tore through the valley. In the early hours I had awoken to find a mouse exploring my beard. In torchlight we chased four visitors from the tent and tried to go back to sleep.

At that time, in 1980, the island was already overrun with millions of feral house mice (Mus musculus), which had been introduced at the beginning of the 19^th century by a party of sealers. We treated the presence of these mice as a nuisance and a threat to any dry foodstuff not kept in secure containers.

About ten years ago I learned that these mice had adapted to conditions on the island in the space of some 200 years and had developed a taste for eggs and chicks. Then, five years ago I was horrified at the news that as a consequence of their new protein rich diet these rodents had increased in size by as much as 50 percent. They had begun to scavenge on the chicks of even the largest birds, the albatrosses.

Field studies revealed that as many as 2 million eggs and chicks were being lost to the predators each year, and some of the rarer species, notably the Tristan Albatross, were threatened with extinction. In the face of this looming ecological disaster the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and other organisations developed a plan to eradicate the mouse population. Using helicopters with agricultural dispensers tons of poisonous cereal would be scattered over the entire surface of the island. This method had been used successfully on other islands and the operation was scheduled for early 2020.

Personnel and equipment were already on Gough when the Covid 19 pandemic intervened and the undertaking had to be called off. One type of plague was given a reprieve by the arrival of another. This means that for at least another year I will be tormented by the image of an albatross chick being slowly gnawed to death as it sits on its nest.

To view my longer work as an author, you can find me on Smashwords here.