Monday 11th August 2003 – My Hilarious Sitcom Life

After the guestbook fiasco, I am pleased to report that I have had an eventful weekend, packed full of genuine Terry and June - style humorous incidents, with which to restore my reputation. Or more precisely, two genuine Terry and June moments, plus other mundane stuff that I will embellish.

We travelled back to Birmingham on Friday in the stifling heat. I am now as sick of hearing myself bleat about the weather as I am of enduring it, so I’m trying hard to be macho and stoic and just get on with things, no matter how sticky and stinky I am. But as we drove back, the pool of sweat gathering around my crotchal area was sufficient to convince me that – by selecting long trousers and inappropriately woolly socks with shoes - I had made the wrong choice of travelling clothes.

We stopped at the Welcome Break services in Oxford, and I headed straight to the men’s toilets to get changed. Men’s toilets at service stations are always extremely smelly, and this was no exception. There was an eye-watering, paint-peeling brown fug in the air, yet everyone went about their business as if they couldn’t smell a thing.

I located the most isolated, and least vile cubicle to get changed in. Even this one left much to be desired – a piss-encrusted seat and dirty, slightly wet floor. Given that I was going to be getting changed out of trousers, socks and shoes, and into shorts and sandals (cool sandals that make me look like Lethal Weapon’s Mel Gibson), but couldn’t sit on the toilet or let my un-shoed feet touch the floor, it was not going to be an easy job.

Loosening my laces, I gingerly stepped out of my trousers, putting my feet back into the shoes as I removed each leg. This was good. All was well. I then removed my socks using the same manoeuvre. Easy. Then, as a treat to myself after a long and sweaty week at work, I decided to remove my underpants (If these entries are becoming too concerned with my nether regions, then please let me know, and I will reduce the content).

Again, all was well. Folding my trousers once, I placed my pants on top of them, and then folded the trousers again, to form a secure, underpant-tight parcel. The final step was simply to don my shorts. Ha ha ha! Ah – ha ha ha HAA!! This was going to be easy. Very easy. Only an idiot could mess this up now

But, in the flush of shorts-related pride, I hadn’t bargained for the door of the cubicle to the left of me suddenly, and very urgently, being flung open. An unseen body launched itself violently into the cubicle, locking it behind him. The seat was thrown up with a clatter, and the walls around me shook as the anonymous gentlemen loudly struggled with zips and poppers, before a frenzied rustling, and the clink of a belt buckle hitting the floor indicated that he had freed himself up sufficiently to begin evacuating his bowels.

Just inches away from me, the stranger broke wind – abruptly, violently. The report echoed around the opera house-like acoustics of the room like a gunshot. No words from within the cubicle – no sound except for a brief, almost inaudible grunt / sigh of anguish or relief. Followed by a watery cascade of something so, so vile that I swayed and had to clutch the walls either side of me to retain my balance.

Forgetting the state of the floor beneath me or the crusty yellow toilet seat behind, I frantically struggled into my shorts, slipped my sandals onto my now-wet feet, and hurried from my cubicle and into the open air of the service station lobby, leaving Dysentery Man to tremble, stink and splash on alone.

Unfortunately, in my rush to vacate the smelly toilet, I neglected to ensure the integrity of my trouser / underpant parcel. As I speed-walked toward the shop, in search of something stodgy by Ginsters, the pants somehow worked themselves free, and – in a moment that was practically a homage to Terry and June, The Good Life, and every other underwear and social awkwardness-based 1980s sitcom – plopped to the floor at the feet of three women in burkhas. In the T & J rendering of this moment, they would have recoiled in pantomime horror before issuing an embarrassing fatwah that would no doubt be executed at some point in the near future as I was hosting a dinner party for my boss and his wife. In reality they simply glanced dismissively at me as I retrieved my damp underwear, and gave me a wider-than-normal berth as they walked around me.

All the same, a profoundly modern, and yet vintage moment if only it had been televised.