» Doctors, Nurses, Dentists and Hospitals

I love the smell of sebum in the morning
About 10 years ago I had a really sore spot on my back, just on my belt line. It got to be a red angry lump, as if I had a golf ball implanted under the muscle. It was just in the part of my back where I couldn't get a good look at it/reach it to have a squeeze, so I went to the docs.

He took a look and said it was an infected sebaceous cyst - a fucking bit zit - and he'd have to lance it.

Now, we all like to squeeze zits when we're on our own, don't we? He got a small scalpel to open a hole and then spend a good 15 minutes squeezing evil-smelling nameless blood-smeared yellowish goo out of it. In between my yelps of pain, I could almost hear him grinning. I looked round and yes, he was grinning like a kid who'd got both a blonde, a brunette and a bearded Action Man from different indulgent relatives all at the same birthday.

After my back had coughed out the last lumps of matter, he taped me back up and actually shook me hand and thanked me and said "That was fun - I needed that after the day I've had".

I should have been weirded out but somehow it felt like I'd done him a good turn.
(Thu 11th Mar 2010, 17:28, More)

» Training courses, seminars and conferences

Jacuzzi fun
One of my first ever corporate jollies was at the Spider's Web Hotel somewhere near Watford in about 1990. I was a recently failed college non-graduate in the throes of failing as a commission-only insurance salesman for a cowboy outfit (long defunct) called General Portfolio. It was some kind of sales conference thingy - lots of by-the-numbers sales spiel and supposedly motivational guff like Ask Closing Questions, Always Be Closing, and so on.

I hated it, mostly because I was shit at it, in turn because I had the remnants of a conscience about flogging unsuitable policies to people who didn't really need them, but that's by-the-by.

The thing was, after a hard days' trying not to doze off, we were all given a slap-up feed and left to our own devices. Most of us were young - early 20s - so we were pretty uniformly keen on getting pissed and leching at the few women on the course (several of whom were pretty fit).

There was a gym/sauna type of thing at the hotel, which four of five of us were in, mainly because two of the foxiest women the late-Thatcherite insurance industry had to offer were also there. Our clumsy efforts (ok, my clumsy efforts) to chat them up included following them into a big communal jacuzzi, my first time in such a contraption.

It was a big circular thing, with room for about 8 people. One of the two women was clearly a bit pissed off by the attention of five cock-driven spotty herberts, but the other seemed to be enjoying it (more likely, she enjoyed the power of winding us up). So she was doing lots of stretching and back-arching to show off her impressive decolletage. This was even more impressive in t'jacuzzi, as her swimsuit became somewhat translucent. I hadn't had any since I dropped out of uni, so my old chap decided he wanted to have a look too, which just made me lean right forward.

This positioned my school-bathers-clad chocolate starfish directly over one of the water jets, which made matters worse from a stimulatory perspective, but I had few options to move as the jacuzzi was full, so I just stayed there hunched forward trying desperately to think of unpleasant mental images so I'd lose my erection and could get out and change without frightening passers-by with it. (Ok, without becoming a laughing stock.)

Once the girls got bored of their teasing, they left, followed shortly after by my mates, and were replaced by some fat Hertfordshire businessmen. Astonishingly enough, this resulted in the decrease in stimulation required and I, too, was able to get to the changing rooms.

After a few moments, though, I felt the urgent nudging of the turtle's head and dashed off to the lav. Sitting down, I proceeded to jet at least half a gallon of rust-coloured chlorinated jacuzzi water into the pan like I had a fire hydrant somewhere in my lower intestine that had just been switched on.

Yes, I gave myself a prodigious enema in public in a hotel in Watford. I'm not proud. At least not at the time. I was relieved, though, that the girls had got bored when they did - another five minutes, and all eight of us would have been sitting in my diluted bowel-washings.

Given that GP was one of the worst companies for pensions mis-selling, that's probably all we deserved...
(Fri 16th Mar 2012, 16:25, More)

» Lies that went on too long

The truth about Saint George
Turkish not English? Check. George of Lydda.

He did kill a dragon, though. Two dragons, in fact. And they were Chinese dragons, at that. But what do you do with a dead dragon? You can't eat them - poisonous, see?

So old George asks around, and gets told to dig a big pit, roll in the two large reptilian corpses, being careful not to step in the puddles of blood as it would dissolve his armour along with most other parts of him. Once he's done that, he has to use lots of quicklime and potash and other such caustic subtances to try to neutralise the nasty dragon toxins.

And they were the lyes that went on two Lóng
(Fri 9th Mar 2012, 14:43, More)

» My Arch-nemesis

For two years at school, before he got expelled...
...a bigger, older kid called Mark bullied me fairles relentlessly. Culminating in one dinner break where he and his mates trapped me at the bottom of a staircase (with locked doors, etc.) while they stood on the floor above and hawked green phlegm at me, kicking the crap out of me if I tried to get past them and escape. This went on for the best part of an hour.

Some years later, after he'd been kicked out for being a thickie thug, he was in the local paper having jumped out of a first floor window (second floor, Merkins) during the course of an interrupted burglary. And landed on wrought iron railings, perforating his bowel because one of the spikes went up his arse.

I couldn't have imagined a better comeuppance if I'd tried.
(Fri 30th Apr 2010, 14:25, More)

» Unusual talents

I can still do this...
(...big piccies, so will post in replies)

The pics are 23 years, five stone and male pattern baldness ago, but I still have the screwdriver somewhere.
(Fri 19th Nov 2010, 14:24, More)