Ingredient X. That’s what brewers, distillers and vintners add to their products besides fermented grain and fruit. Not much is known about it, but the little that has been tweezed open is horrifying in the extreme.

Ingredient X is what makes regular people suddenly lose their inhibitions. It’s what makes them do impromptu stripteases on bar counters, snog unlikely partners in ill-advised situations, and generally give them a misplaced feeling of omnipotence. On the way home from a hard night out (or morning, if the truth be told)? Need to wee? Heck, just pick one of the doorways that isn’t swaying, and name it your honorary toilet. You have been given the right of proxy by ingredient X to capture all open space as a potential toilet, forever dooming it to be annexed to the Mighty Kingdom of X, (wee hours only).

It is also naturally secreted. Proof of this was discovered by me only yesterday. I was taking James to school on the train, as I can’t drive, and Neen is away, and we had to walk through the subway under the railway line. The following is an almost exact transcript of the damning truth…

James: Mmmmm It smells like Ryan in here.

Me: Eh? Who’s Ryan (Thinking, it smells like drunk people used this place as a toilet)

James: Ryan is in my class. He smells like this place where the trains go over.

Me: Is it a bad smell? (Ok, I can smell some disinfectant smells now)

James: No, It’s a nice smell.

Me: Maybe it’s soap?

James: No, it’s not soap, but it smells… different. I love the smell of Ryan.

Me: (Quickly) Right then, nearly home…

So Ryan smells like a subway. Either the wee smell, or the industrial chemicals. And James loves the smell. Does Ryan pee his pants? Does he bathe in lye? My greatest hope is that Ryan is using some of that Eau de Toilette aimed at children, and James has confused the smell. (Why, oh why is he smelling other children?)

I’ve never really had much of a sense of smell because of allergies, so I can’t say whether I was nasally moved by my classmates. At the very least, maybe I should relax the ‘No Guns’ rule with my son, and feed him lots of red meat. (Nah, I’ll always love him, even if he grows up ‘loving the smell of Ryans’.

Favourite sign of the week: Today I walked past a shop that was taking advantage of the wintery snap to advertise their soups on a blackboard outside the door….

“HOT  TESTY SOUP” They promised. I rolled about laughing, inwardly, as I pictured these grouchy bowls of smooshed vegetables getting all snippy with each other. ‘Do you mind,’ they said, ‘we’re a bit fed up with being kept on the boil the whole day…’

My smallish wardrobe means that I usually try to get at least two days wear out of an item of clothing. Not consecutive days, obviously, but after day one, I fold the item informally (ie into a ball) and find the least crowded shelf to cram it onto.

Why is it, that when I take it out for the second day, stains have miraculously appeared all over the place? Greasy spots, red streaks, orangey exclamation marks and dark green smudges. How do they get there? How did I manage to wear the thing on day one without noticing? Was I loping around oblivious to the besmirched state of my clothes?

Perhaps there is some mischief-making beast living somewhere (entirely possible, given the exercise in chaos theory that is my cupboard) that turns everything upside down, all the while spraying everything with a can of Stain-On.

Before I forget, underclothes and socks are one-day-only clothes.

Anybody here over thirty? Remember the movie ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’? There is a scene where a mountain is being created out of mud (?) in some family’s lounge. My garden looks a bit like that, with the recent return of the mole rats. They push up these sandy mounds about a half metre across, and move an enormous amount of soil for such a small creature. They eat all the roots of the plants, at least, those plants which survived the drought.

Nothing gets rid of them. There are several businesses that claim to be able to eradicate them, but nothing works. Right now I am busy devising a way to get them addicted to hard drugs. I put a few lines of coke inside their runs, next week, a few syringes full of smack, and finally, a couple of bags of pure heroin. Then I’ll cut off their supply, and they’ll be forced to burrow their way to Afghanistan, where the ground is harder, but the poppies are plentiful.

Still missing Neen. Marriage hasn’t taught me how to sleep in a half-empty bed. I bet she’s busy picking up some slang in Atlanta: ‘Hey, Y’all, Supersize me!’

By now I am almost certain that Neen survived the longest night of her life (traveling backwards in time) and is in Atlanta. I kept scanning the international news for inklings of air disasters, but no disasters apart from the Jackson trial and the usual global bickering was leading the headlines.

Because of Hannah’s intermittent vomiting, my kitchen skills haven’t been challenged yet. A pot of soup here, a dash of noodles there…

I feel like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, a ghastly apparition patrolling the perimeter of my house, crying out in a hollow voice and watching ‘Will and Grace’ re-runs.

This week, I get to sleep with my sister-in-law. (Remember, the one whose jeans I wore?) She’s promised to visit, bringing my niece, and will probably stay over. It will be great to have a conversation with another human, without it involving remembering dinosaur names, or nagging me to open the ‘Powerpuff Chips’. Don’t worry, as attractive as she is (she looks like Neen,a bit) we’re purely filial.

Starting to feel sorry for myself. We work widowers need nerves of steel to cope. I guess I’m just ‘anon’ at the moment. Just how did Sir Cliff Richard survive all those years as a bachelor?

It’s the little things that cheer me up, such as this, which I read in a back issue of Focus, a Science and Technology magazine:

“(In space) NASA said they do not have lavatories; they have (or at least, had then) a Waste Collection System, or WCS. If you want to pee, there is a flexible hose, like a vacuum cleaner hose, with a suction in there, and a triangular nozzle on the end which is supposed to fit both sexes. As you can imagine, It doesn’t, because boys and girls are different. And, what’s more, the vacuum is never strong enough, so it is always a bit wet from the last person…” Adam Hart-Davis

Pretty good stuff, eh? I should invite the guy to be a guest author here. I figure, if you spend all that money on a magazine, it is money well spent if you come across only one insight of that kind.

My head is full of Powerpuffs and Pokemon today, the bilge tanks overflowing with Richard Scarry and Rikki Lake. In the course of twenty-four hours I have cauterized my synapses, on a diet of TV and junk food. Hopefully tomorrow, I will be able to venture out into the big world, and see grown-ups. Neen, if you made it to the States, please tell me how to use the washing machine…

Joke.

I work on my feet. Every day I run backwards and forwards, across the shop, up the stairs to the office, and only sit down at lunchtime.

I discovered the heartless nature of my colleagues yesterday, at the end of a busy afternoon. As I stood at the counter, my foot muscles gave way to a stabbing spasm, and I hopped around in the manner of one stung.

They looked at me as though I was mad. One of them made the assumption that I was doing a happy dance because I was about to go on leave… Not true. Before I had a chance to consider the wisdom of imparting a scrap of knowledge, my mouth was open:

‘Actually, I occasionally get piercing pains on the sole of my foot because of an accident I had while tadpole hunting. A long time ago.’

My attempts at explaining about the broken bottle at the bottom of a muddy pool fell on deaf ears. They rolled with laughter as though my maimed foot was the funniest thing on this planet.

Ever wish you’d kept it to yourself?

I got home late on Tuesday evening, and headed for the bathroom to do what you do in the bathroom. Odd. There seemed to be a really nasty smell, and that was before I got there. The smell had been there for a while, but as my plumbing skills are limited, I have ignored it. Kind of like a blocked drain smell, but only if it was blocked with a decaying corpse.

As much as I sometimes believe Neen has the capacity for a brutal slaying, I chose to select another source for the reek. It hit me. There, next to the toilet. It has been standing there so long that you can overlook it. The nappy bucket.

Now Hannah has been solely on disposable diapers for a few months now, as she is getting potty trained. The cloth diapers have been washed and folded and unused for ages. Or so I thought. I must admit, that with Hannah, I avoided the cloth ones wherever possible, and opted for disposable, but Neen was trying to save money by alternating the two.

I made the (stupid, stupid) impulsive move of removing the lid. The bucket gave a soft ‘siiiigh’, like a depressed asthmatic, and then it hit me in the face. To say ‘like a brick’ would be a major understatement. This stench was like a wrecking ball. I collapsed gagging and weeping to the smooth tiles, and forced myself to peer inside. There were several nappies in a very unusual shade of brown rotting in a pool of stuff that wouldn’t be out of place in a primeval swamp. It was evolutionary. Life forms were developing even as I watched in horror. They were learning to use rudimentary tools, and starting to speak in organized sentences.

Although weakened by my shock, I managed to stagger to the bedroom, and gave Neen the bad news before falling to the ground again. She could clearly see my distress (I was really playing up the gagging noises now) and said ‘I’ll deal with it tomorrow’. I went to sleep.

She really did get rid of the ancient rags, and although I felt a wee bit guilty for not offering to do it, I was vastly relieved. Phew.

The following day, she was repeatedly puked on by Hannah, who has a bug. She slept in her room, and cleaned up the sweet soya-milk vomit. The next day she came home from work early, and was puked on again. There was runny poop, too. I went to work.

Now I owe her big time. The concentrated nature of these calamities has enlarged their impact. How do I make up for it? No more can I turn the other cheek when the retching begins. Already today I have scrubbed the chunky bits out of the carpet. Payback time. My fear is that the stomach bug spreads, and that we will all be heaving like rookie sailors. Neen is especially edgy, as she does not want to go on a long trip with nothing but a small paper bag between her and the contents of her stomach.

Pizza anyone?

These are troubled times. What cheers me up is using the ‘What’s the worst that could happen’ theory. I was reading in a book today, ‘Everything Bad is Good for You’ that in certain types of movies we are led to anticipate the sequence of events. The example the author cited was the clichéd nubile-babysitter-at-home-alone-apart-from-the-kids-who-forgets-to-lock-the-door… You know what is going to happen next…

So with Neen headed off to the States this weekend, what are my unlocked doors?

We have had one burglary and one flood this year, and taken steps to avoid their recurrence. We have nothing left worth stealing. (Are you listening, blogger-burglars?) So if I forgot to turn the alarm on, and if the same burglars came back, they would probably leave again in a hurry. If the water tank flooded again, the insurers would replace the ceiling, and paint the bathroom. (Nothing wrong with that?)

I can up the ante a bit. Let’s say the tax people discovered that my procrastination has extended to not registering as a taxpayer, what could happen? They could freeze my ‘assets’ (good luck to them finding any!), and make copies of my hard-drive, which is full of stuff like this, rather than a trail of financial deception. So we would move in with a friend until it was sorted out. Easy.

Hmmm. The unpaid traffic fine Neen was disputing? They could confiscate our rusty ford, which would hopefully then get trashed. We need a new car. Can’t scare me.

Illness? Nope, I’m all prepared. I have a copy of the wonderful book ‘Where There Is No Doctor’ waiting to be consulted. It is a basic medical text aimed at primary care givers in an African village setting. (Sure, I could be less self-sufficient, and just go to the doctor or emergency room…) I can cure virtually everything using rehydration fluid and splints made from stout branches. My children are in safe, if somewhat unsophisticated, hands.

Gimme something with bite…

Aliens. In the unlikely attempt of jelly-beings from another universe working out how to travel light years and enter our atmosphere without their rudimentary bottoms getting singed, I am prepared. Like C3PO in Star Wars, I have mastered one language, and learned to say ‘hello’ in several others. I can offend the beasts in French, and then pour cleaning fluid on their flying orb, as it ‘gets rid of all known germs’.

And anyway, after two weeks in the isolation of my house, I may appreciate a fresh environment, even if I do end up with small hexagonal scars above my kidneys…

If Neen is kidnapped by a terrorist group trying to prove a point, that may work to our advantage. Being resourceful, she will escape, and then we can write a harrowing, poignant biography, which will be picked up by Oprah, and then we can retire on the royalties.

Now the smaller things that could go wrong seem infinitely less challenging. The kettle breaks, so that I can’t boil water for instant noodles, or my morning coffee? Easy peasy. I’ll resort to doing everything on an open fire. Washing machine breaks? Pah! Just wear the clothes till they are uniformly brown, and then buy other clothes. Like Reacher in the Lee Child novels. (He’s an ex military policeman who roams around, and buys clothes, wears them for a couple of days, and then discards them. Practicality is the name of the game).

Underneath my stoic veneer of confidence, I have my fears. There must be something for which I am not prepared. Oh yeah. The fingernails… Anything you’d care to add to my list of disasters? You are more than welcome to do so, provided you tack on a workable solution. I need you. I need your help, internet.

Survivor, Cape Town. Three people, fourteen days. Watch as two children outwit a grown man, and aim for their daily reward of as much chocolate as they can eat, and unlimited TV. They wish.

In my five years as a father, I have learned many things. I tentatively learned how to pick up a floppy newborn, and carry him through the house without banging his head on the door-frames (after a few tries, anyway), I learned how to wash his hair without touching the creepy fontanelle. (Am I the only person whose stomach turns at the idea of thin membranes, pulsing veins and delicate brain matter fizzing beneath?)

I have changed nappies, both disposable and cloth, and dealt with a small hillock of squishy poo. I’ve been vomited on, punched, had my eyeballs scratched and lost count of the amount of times my glasses have been misted by the fine spray of a baby learning to raspberry.

My youngest is now two and a half, the eldest, five and a half, and I have never cut their nails. As babies, those pale crescents were scarcely bigger than  this: (. No way was I going to go anywhere near them. Not with those ‘safety’ scissors, not with little clippers with tiny rabbit decals, and not with anything sharper than a spoon. I have been happy to trim hair. I have bathed and powdered them. I have nursed them through fevers and allowed them to cut their teeth on my fingers, but I have never touched their nails.

Which must soon change. As Neen will be away for two weeks, I have the choice of mummifying their fingers and toes in masking tape, or trimming those ridiculously fast-growing talons. I fear Neen will return to a family of children with truncated stubs at the end of their hands. They will resemble the flippers of platypuses, and will be useless for any act requiring fine motor co-ordination. They will be forced to wear stout leather gauntlets at school, and become known as ‘the webbed ones’. All that will remain to me is the hope that one day plastic surgery will progress to regrowth of fingertips, and that they won’t hate me for spoiling their chances of becoming concert pianists, or macramé experts.

And that is just the hands. How much will I have to pay some private cobbler to custom-make booties for their clunky appendages? Ever seen pictures of those women in china whose feet were bound? That is exactly the kind of image that haunts me when I consider the task at hand.

You need fingertips to do so many things. Like fasten buttons, type Pulitzer prize-winning novels, and pick your nose. They will be stump-fingered illiterates, with giant crusty boogers dangling from their nostrils…

But so much of parenting is pretense. You act as though you’ve done these things a thousand times before, but in your head you are screaming in fear, expecting someone to call your bluff: “Hey! You! You’re not qualified to do that! Step away from the baby, thaaaat’s right, back off…” Did previous generations know how to do these things, or did they just wing it, too? Maybe Jewish people have the right idea. After a circumcision, a little fingernail trimming is nothing…

Don’t tell Neen about this! I’m already having to pretend everything will be just fine while she’s away.

A separate thought: If she is flying backwards in time to Atlanta airport, if she keeps on going long enough will she be young again? If the pilot kept on going, would the plane be full of wispy headed infants pooping in their seats? Who would land the plane? Who would supervise the drinks trolley? Do you have thoughts like this, too?

So our insurance paid out. We received notification that we will be reimbursed a big chunk of cash for items liberated from our house during a recent burglary. The temptation is to spend the money on carefree living, rather than replace the vanished goods. We didn’t get enough to replace all the cds, but at least we will be able to start gathering some again. I felt justified, until I worked out how much money we have spent on insurance over the last ten years.

Don’t ever do that. It’s like working out how much money you have earned over your lifetime, or how many bags of chips you eat a year. Some things are best just appreciated at the time, and not thought of in terms of hundreds, thousands, or how many you could fit into an oil tanker.

Try that as a diet. Work out what, say, one chocolate bar a day looks like when multiplied by the average life expectancy: (365x 75) and you get over twenty-seven thousand chocolate bars. For some people, that could be doubled. Likewise with cigarettes. A pack of twenty a day for sixty years (although life expectancy is somewhat querulous with smokers) = 438000 cigarettes. That’s a lot of crud going down your throat.

If you work out how much money you spend on these things, that can also be a deterrent.

I read a book last year on the body-building culture (purely as something different to read; not out of any personal interest). It was a bit of an expose on the crazy lengths men and women go to to inflate their bodies. The bizarre thing was that the obsession left these people unable to make reasoned decisions regarding their bodies. They would eat vast quantities of food, and use so many pills and drugs that their kidneys looked like peanuts, and their veins as thick as ropes of licorice. Men of thirty were finding themselves in frailcare as their bodies gave up.

I remember leaving home when I was eighteen. I no longer had to be responsible about feeding myself. Also, there was no mum to feed me. I would binge on huge bags of cheese doodles, giant tubs of chocolate flavoured gloop, and anything else that made my mouth water. I would stuff my face, and then be broke. Then I would go a week eating nothing solid at all. I would subsist on the orange juice in my tequila, or the calories in beer.

I lost weight. And very nearly my mind. And I gained a very real appreciation for the meals my mum had made me. Soon, I replaced my mother with Neen (ha ha ha just kidding…Ow! Stop hitting me ow! Ow!) And started eating again…

Not that I am worried about the prospect of being left to my own devices again, as Neen travels to the States next week… I guess we will find something to eat. Sigh. I will be off work, so cooking won’t be a problem. But I’m guaranteed to gain a renewed appreciation of Neen’s culinary wizardry.

But I expect to be a little thinner, too.

If you live in the city, chances are you’ll probably end up at a coffee shop. All over the world, millions sit tipping mugs to lips, and pacifying the caffeine monkey sitting on their shoulder. I often do just that for business reasons, and frequently I’ll sit opposite someone who orders decaffeinated coffee.

Am I alone in thinking that this is a bizarre thing to do? To go to a coffee shop, and to order an item that has had the coffee bit taken out of it? Essentially, they are drinking brown coffee-flavoured water. I just hope that it’s not a trend.

Turn around, and there will be ‘Un-coffee shops’ popping up on every street corner. Clean-cut people will be sipping their brown water, absent-mindedly playing with their little packets of non-sugar, or ‘sweetener’. Later they will head off to early-evening clubs, and drink alcohol-free beers, and then shadow box in the parking lot.

I know for a fact that in Brazil, coffee agronomists have created a caffeine-free plant, and are in the process of making it commercially viable.

If you are a vegetarian, have you ever really honestly enjoyed one of those soya-dogs? Or soya burgers? They are as edible as stage props made from polystyrene. I can still remember a guy at school being sold a bag of origanum under the guise of dope, and him faking being stoned. Shooo, duuude, far out…

Going to a coffee shop and having decaf is like a gay man going to a straight singles bar. What’s the point? (Unless he’s fishing for compliments about his new highlights). Kinda like having a cell phone that never rings. The temptation is to fake interesting half-conversations. “Yeah… Don’t worry, we took care of him… yeah…In the trunk… Weighted down with stones…What?…Oh, that. …I’m on the bus…Salmon, if ya know what I mean…”

But the minute you do that, the thing will ring, and your cover will be blown…

The moral is: Don’t tell anyone you enjoy something. They’ll do a few research papers using under-graduate students as guinea pigs, and then come up with vague theories about the harmfulness of everything. Then those same scientists will get cushy jobs designing faux products.

Just sit back and enjoy your little pleasures, and don’t give in to those people who would rather be two-dimensional tromp-l’oeil mirages, diluting everything they do with ‘de-’ this and ‘non-‘ that. Double Espresso anyone?

(Formal apology: no gay men or under-graduate students were harmed during the tappin ou of this nonsense. It’s just that say, Eskimos wouldn’t have been as funny in a singles bar, what with all that seal blubber, and real guinea pigs ar sorta cute, unlike under-graduate students).

Is the following a koan on which to meditate, or the babblings of a man who has lost his metaphorical ear to the madness of this age…?

‘A flat cockroach is as quiet as a propeller that isn’t moving’.

Thank you, James, for that piece of wisdom (?). I don’t know where he gets it from.

Today as I sat on the rocks, I watched a pod of dolphins hunching their way through the water beyond the wave line. The sky was overcast, and they appeared as dark shapes, sinister even. A far cry from the cheerful chatterers we are led to expect. The dolphins of doom.

Following yesterday’s post, in which I revealed the unglamourous truth behind my façade of neatness, I struggle to come up with anything constructive. Did I mention that my ragged pants are at least clean? I hope so.

In case you were all wondering who I killed in the army, the answer is nobody. In the ‘80’s, all white boys/men over the age of sixteen if they had dropped out of school, or eighteen if they were finished with school were conscripted into the Defense Force. These were the dying years of apartheid, and if you refused, you could be imprisoned for six years. I was lucky, in that I was the first intake to do one year instead of two.

I could have picked up my British passport and gone to the UK like my brothers, but I elected to remain South African, to be with Neen.

I chose to be in the military band, as I played the trumpet, and spent a wasted year in the Kalahari Desert, playing at parades. I had to do a solo for the ex-president, FW De Klerk (remember him?) when he was still president. I drank more beer than you could possibly imagine. When I started, I told them I was off my head, so they refused to let me carry a weapon. Oddly, they chose people like me to sit in a small trench at the shooting range, and replace the targets. We sat huddled under our oversized and dented helmets, with the rifle rounds pinging around us. I still get very edgy when I hear gunfire…

Retrospectively, I should have taken the moral high ground and gone to prison, but I was politically ignorant at the time. Plus, they issued us with natty underwear. I guess being involved in rebuilding SA makes up for that in a small way.

We are a sensitive lot, my family. Tonight James was weeping over a ‘pet’ songololo that had gone missing. A songololo is a centipede. Not to be confused with a ‘gogga’ (the g’s pronounced like the ‘ch’ sound in chutzpah). (chawcha) which is just a general name for a bug.

And I lied. In my comments for yesterday. I said I don’t have a favourite pair: I do. They are red, and still relatively intact. I call them my lucky pants, although is not meant to have any of the innuendoes single men may attach. I simply feel more complete, call it being holistically dressed. I am at one with myself, body, mind and underwear. I have ‘centred’ myself in the best possible way.

Thank you for listening. The truth heals.