Dark Night of the Soul #3: Mein Kampf

This seems to have been a popular subject on several of our blogs recently, so here goes... Everyone has their own personal struggle; Adolf Hitler’s – if only he’d left it at that - was with farting, and to stop it his quack doctor prescribed little black pills containing dangerous substances like strychnine and antropine. The Führer's over use of these probably accounted for his increased irascibility and losing the war. When I first arrived in Romania I had my own gastric struggle; the food here is very heavy - “peasant cuisine” makes it sound more glamorous than it is – and my mother-in-law is a woman who doesn’t understand “no”. I was in hell. After 3 days I phoned the Guinness Book of Records*:

Me: Hello, can I speak to Ross McWhirter, please?
Girl: I’m afraid he’s no longer with us, sir
Me: What, you mean he’s gone off and formed a rival Book of Records??
Girl: No, I mean he’s dead.
Me: How old was he?
Girl: He was 50
Me: Well, that’s not much of a rec…
Girl: He was assassinated by the IRA
Me: Oh I see, sorry. What about the other…
Girl: Mr Norris is also no longer with us – maybe I can help you?
Me: Yes, maybe you can, you see I’ve been constipated for three days now and I was wondering if this is a record
Girl: Have you been eating Romanian food, sir?
Me: Yes of course I have! My mother-in-law keeps shovelling it down me and I can’t get it out again!
Girl: We get this a lot. Well, the record for being constipated whilst eating Romanian food is very long; in fact the McWhirters thought it would probably never be broken.
Me: How long?
Girl: 3 weeks, 2 days, 24 minutes and 49 seconds
Me: What?? Oh good grief! I must go to toilet sooner than that, I must I must I must….
Girl: Sorry
Me: Tell you what though, I’ve stopped eating food altogether now as I can’t get any more in – what’s the record for not having a dump whilst eating nothing at all?
Girl: Probably 94 days: Cork Prison hunger strike, 1920. The Irish republican movement had the last word on that as well.
Me: (gulp)
Girl: Might I suggest you see a doctor, sir?
Me: They’d laugh at me
Girl: Well, you seem to be an intelligent person, perhaps you could find a scientific answer yourself; you could start by sitting down and working it out with a pencil.
Me: Yes, well, you’re right of course, I’ll go and get a pencil and some paper and…. Oh, I see, ha ha, very funny

So, that was a waste of a phone call. But I’m happy to report that time and Turd-Purge Plus** eventually worked their special magic, and the situation has since then largely been avoided by feigning sleep/death/madness when the fourth course is plonked in front of me. I’ve still no idea how the IRA got so involved in all this though. To finish, here’s the best - possibly the only – song ever written about constipation; Screamin’ Jay Hawkins telling it like it is, accompanied (for some bizarre reason) by Serge Gainsbourg:



* I couldn't find a clip of the BBC programme Record Breakers with them on, but here from American TV (1:20 minutes in) are The McWhirters.

** New improved formula with plutonium sulphate. (I also tried Recto-Rout and Shit Shifter but frankly they just weren’t up to the job.)

Dark Night of the Soul #2: My Birthday

I just had a birthday. Some people want a bike for their birthday, others a party dress or a My Little Pony. But my one wish, pure and simple, was to get through one day without being engaged in conversation about Romanian food. More a mission, really. And if you think this should be easy then you’ve never lived where I live. These are the diversionary tactics I tried:

(1) Talking about everybody’s 2nd favourite topic of conversation: members of their family.

(2) Wearing my full highland dress: a kind of “shock and awe” tactic.

(3) Pretending I was French, so I'd be expected to neither understand nor care - or, alternatively, so they’d talk about another nation’s cuisine... or food in general... or food as a metaphor for something else... anything, really.

(4) Getting drunk. (This, as usual, happened later after everybody else had left).

We'd invited many people to our house, good people, honest people, people I care about. But despite this I knew from the moment I woke up that I would fail. But this put no halter on my blind ambition, and I hereby bask in the glory of Heroic British Failuredom:

(1) “Hands off cocks on socks we’re charging the Russian guns! Yes, lovely boy, it’s called “The Valley Of Death”, you want me to draw you a map does you? Oh, I see you is crying: is it because I am standing on your hair?!” (etc)

(2) “Hey you, Oatsie Boy, pop outside there’s a good chap I think one of the sledge-marmosets has run orf. Don’t bother looking for your boots, I ate them last night with a rather nice Chianti that I bought with me.”

(3) “I, George Mallory, am going up Everest, but I'm not taking any oxygen with me ‘cos that’s for poofs, innit. Oh, and if see me fall over come up and turn me round so it looks like was coming down.”

(4) Across the Andes by Frog.

Heck, I was so bomb-happy at the end of the day that I took everybody out for dinner at a Romanian restaurant.