Thursday 20th April, 2017                        1900

Sod it. I debated writing about this in case it caused offence but after a bottle of plonk, what the hell?

I have been having problems with regulating bowel movements for the past few months. Age maybe? Or perhaps it is a lack of access to the sort of roughage that I like. Bran flakes don’t exist here otherwise I wouldn’t have a problem.

The fact is, this term although I only work two days a week, those days start at 0500 and finish when I get home at 1800. The school only has squat loos with no doors and very low partitions so whoever is taking a pee next to you can peer over. Besides the fact I cannot physically use one of those toilets at my time of life even if modesty were not a problem, it is a case of trying to get regular. Like when I wake up, which is how it ever was,

Never used to be a problem. It’s not as if I eat unhealthily even though I eat a lot less fruit than possibly I should. But it has become a problem and one which I dread may cause me to have a crisis in the middle of a working day.

So I have been taking some pills which were prescribed to me nearly seven years ago by my GP - in half doses - as a full dose opens the dam a little too much and for too long. I have also been forcing myself to eat fruit even though I don’t want it. The idea being that I can have a movement at 0500 if necessary.

It isn’t working, my body says we will do it just after lunch. That’s fine if I am home, not so when at work.

The pills work even at half dose. One huge effect is to evacuate all the trapped wind in the intestines before the avalanche. After three days of medicating I had rather hoped this morning I could have “gone” before work, having farted like a good’un in bed last night.

T’was not to be.

No problem, just a double period and I was finished.

Everything was great and when I left school and took the number 12 bus to Five Streams Mountain I felt good. I had a seat with no foot-room sitting next to a woman who got off after a few stops and allowed me to shift over so I could stretch my legs.

As the bus continued I felt the urge to trump and duly did so, spreading my buttocks strategically so that little sound was created.

My God. The stink!!! Panic.

It was as if there was a week old corpse of a flying fox which had been rolled in untreated human sewage had been placed on the seat beside me. My only consolation was that I was the only one subjected to this olfactory affront.

Except shortly thereafter and while the miasma (which was almost visible as a shimmer) was still lingering, the bus stopped. A very elderly and very infirm old lady who was struggling to walk even with the aid of a stick got on and decided the seat next to mine was where she should be.

Panic-stricken, I tried to assist her as the bus moved off by steadying her arms so she could manoeuvre into position. No idea what she said but I can guess that in English it was probably something along the lines of “I’m not dead yet!” and so I left her alone to settle into the decidedly noxious whiff of my making.

I wasn’t sure how I would react if she were to take her stick and start beating me with it for being such a dirty little boy but I suspect my “who, me?” face would have crumbled. Even I found it to be vomit-inducing and  most reminiscent of my younger days when curries were de rigeur three nights a week. God it was vile.

But no, I sat and endured it stoically, as did Grandma. We sat in the microcosm of my making whilst everyone else was blissfully unaware. Four stops further on and Granny got off and I now wonder whether she accepted that it was all part and parcel of the general Chinese stinkiness or she went to her family and told them about the putrescent Laowei she had the misfortune to sit next to on the number 12.