Things that happened during my childhood
These are various stories about things that happened during my childhood, in roughly chronological order.
The Serpentine
When I was three years old my mom went on Top of the Pops. Not as a musician of course - my family were too poor to do something worthwhile and become rich - but as an audience member.
We still have the VHS tape, where she's standing in the audience, swaying awkwardly next to the host, a mullet-haired DJ called Bruno Brookes. That day, Bruno Brookes decided to wear a pink and purple jacket that looked like something the Beatles had rejected for their Sgt. Peppers album. Pink and purple were the colours of the nineties, along with yellow and teal. The brighter and more garish the colours, the better. It was as though someone had taken the colour wheel and purposely ignored rules of color combination.
My mom wore a teal blouse, and it was perhaps for this reason she was plucked from the anonymity of the crowd and allowed to stand next to the host Bruno Brooks, right on center stage. So while Bruno's introducing the show, there's my mom's, swaying nervously from side to side, with all the excitement of like she's waiting for a bus.
While my mom was in the BBC studios on Top of the Pops, my dad took me and my two sisters to London's Hyde Park. Looking after an 8-year-old, 3-year-old, and a baby was perhaps too much work for my dad and he took his eyes from me for just a few seconds so he could look up to the heavens and curse God's name for making him the father of three small children.
During those few seconds I toddled over to the lake and fell in. There was an almighty SPLASH.
"Oh, fucking hell!" my dad shouted as he ran over to rescue me. My dad was supposed to be looking after me, a job he was doing poorly.
Luckily for me, I landed in the water feet first. Also luckily, the water only came up to my waist. In fact, it must have only been a few inches deep.
I stood in the water, soggy, wet, and confused. I was too stunned to cry. Tears would come later. For now, I was in shock. But I was in no real danger.
Then I looked up. I wished I hadn't. Because what I saw was every bird in the lake was swimming towards me.
Ducks, geese, swans, drakes, mallards: they were all pedalling their little feet in the water as furiously as they could. Each bird wanted to get a piece of me first. And I have no doubt what was on their mind: tearing me limb from bloody limb. All their lives, these birds had subsisted solely on a diet of crumbs of bread thrown to them by children and old people, and now they saw a chance, finally, for a change in their diet: human flesh.
I felt terror as all these waterbirds converged towards me on the lake. Their beaks snapped wildly. Their feathers quivered in bloodlust. Their little beady eyes were trained on me like homing missiles.
Just then, a pair of strong arms lifted me out of the water and put me down on the pavement. It was my dad. People were watching in amusement and trying to stifle their laughter.
"Are you okay Paul?" said my dad.
I stood there, scared and humiliated, my clothes dripping wet. Then I started to cry. I was bawling salty tears. Did no one understand I'd just had a near-death experience?
"Shall we get some ice cream?" said my dad.
I immediately stopped crying. "I SWIM," I said, which was my way of saying 'ice cream' but it sounded more like I wanted to go back into the lake for another swim.
But my dad understood and we went and got ice cream. As I licked the creamy white 99 and nibbled on the chocolate flake, my dad said, "Let's not tell your mom you fell in the water, okay?"
And, three hours later, when we met up with Mom, the first thing I told her was that I fell into the water. Well, my Dad deserved it for not looking after me properly.
As I grew up, I forgot most of what happened. Everything except for the crystal clear image of me falling into the lake, the feeling of shock as I stood in the water, and the terror of all those ducks swimming towards me. I would remember that moment for the rest of my life.
The Lego box
One day, when I was four, I climbed the stairs with my sister Lisa. She was only two years old and had to literally climb the stairs as each step was almost as big as she was. When we got to the top, an achievement like reaching the top of Mount Everest, I said, "Lisa, let's go into Mom and Dad's bedroom."
Now, we weren't supposed to go into Mom and Dad's bedroom. It was off-limits, though I don't know why. It was just a bed, a wardrobe, and a load of clothes strung about haphazardly on the floor.
And a box of Lego. It was a big, plastic box of thousands of assorted Lego bricks. For some reason, it was in my Mom and Dad's room.
Just then I had an idea. "Lisa," I said. "I'm going to do a wee in the lego."
Her eyes opened wide and her hand went to her mouth in shock. But I could see she was smiling behind her hand.
I pulled out my little willy. Lisa gasped in shock at the sudden sight of a penis. Then I pointed my willy at the Lego box, closed my eyes and concentrated.
Now, Doing a wee in a place you shouldn't, like a box of Lego, isn't easy, especially if you've been trained since the age of two to do wees in a potty and toilet. But I managed it. The golden wee started to come out the tip of my penis and into the Lego box. The smell of urine filled the air.
I shook out the last drops of wee from my will. Then I fumbled my willy back into my pants. I was proud and had a smirk on my face.
Lisa made her way downstairs and found my mom. "Paul wee le-oh, Paul wee lee-oh," said Lisa.
"Paul, what's she saying?" my mom asked.
I shrugged and said, "I don't know."
Lisa couldn't say "Paul wee lego" and so my mom and dad never found out I did a wee in the Lego box, despite the fact the Lego now smelled of wee and would continue smelling of wee for years later.
The lightbulb
Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. I tried to squash one in a vice.
When I was six, my dad kept a big old-fashioned vice in his shed. One day I went into his shed and put a lightbulb in the vice and turned the handle to see what would happen. I thought the vice would squash the lightbulb flat but instead, the bulb EXPLODED, sending shards of glass flying every which way. My dad came running down the garden and into the shed and he found me standing there, stock still, surrounded by hundreds of shards of broken glass. I was miraculously unharmed.
The safari park
When I was a boy, we used to go to West Midlands Safari Park.
But as we’d get near the entrance, my dad would stop the car and say, “Right, Corryn, get out.”
So Corryn would get out of the car. Dad would open the boot. “Right, Corryn, in you get,” he’d said.
"Why do I have to go in the boot?" she'd ask.
"Because Paul's too little, your mom's too big, and I have to drive," he said.
So Corryn would get in the boot. Dad would close it. Then he would get back in the car and drive into the safari park.
“How many people are in your car today?” the man selling tickets would say.
“Just me, my wife and our son,” said my Dad.
“Okay,” said the man. And my dad would pay for just three people. Like that, he saved ten pounds every time he went to the safari park.
American Adventure
We also used to go to a theme park called American Adventure. It was a theme park based on the Wild Welst: cowboys and Indians, that sort of thing. It can't have been a good idea because it closed down a few years later.
Anyway, one time we went, and we were hungry, and everyone was eating burgers and chips from the food stalls, but my dad said the food stalls were too expensive. He pulled out a camping stove, a saucepan and a bottle of highly flammable gas, and started cooking a tin of potatoes, a tin of peas and carrots, and a tin of steak and gravy. And that's what we ate.
Teddy poo
My mother's mother's name was Sylvia, but we all called her Mom's Mom. We said it like just one word: Momsmom.
I had never been to my grandmother's house even though we only lived three miles away.
She lived in a council house in Castle Vale, where my mom grew up. I have only been to grandmother's house once in my entire life. I was around six years old.
One day my mom took me to see my grandmother. I had never been to my grandmother's house before. The first thing that struck me was the overpowering sweet smell like a perfume bomb had gone off. The next thing was that everything in the house was pink, from the sofa to the walls, to the carpet.
"Take off your shoes," my grandmother instructed as if she lived in a Japanese palace instead of a council house on a rough estate.
With my shoes off, the carpet felt soft and fluffy under my feet. I started to look around the living room. Then I noticed teddy bears everywhere, like an eerie collection in a serial killer's lair.
“Don’t touch those!” my grandmother said. Okay then, you fucking weirdo.
The teddies weren’t for my benefit. They weren't to be played with. They were for display.
In fact, I wasn’t allowed to touch anything, not even my nose when it itched. It was barbaric treatment. Not even Guantanamo Bay prisoners are treated with such hostility.
After a while, I needed to take a poo. So I tugged my mom’s sleeve, and whispered, “Mom, I need a poo.”
“Go and take a poo upstairs then,” said my mom.
So I went upstairs. (This is all true, by the way. I remember all of it.) Going upstairs to take a poo was a novelty. Back in my house, the crapper was on the ground floor, next to where we prepared food in the kitchen.
I found the bathroom. It was pink, just like the rest of the house. Teddy bears were on every surface: on the back of the toilet, on the windowsill, and the floor.
I pulled down my pants, sat on the toilet, and did my business, while under the glassy-eyed gaze of multiple teddy bears.
Then I looked for the toilet paper but there was no toilet paper anywhere.
So I picked up a teddy bear — a big white teddy bear — and wiped my bum on it. I had no choice! There was no toilet paper!
I never told anyone. Not until I got home, when I said to my mom, "There was no toilet roll in the bathroom so I had to wipe my bum on a teddy bear."
I expected my mom to get mad at me but instead, she just laughed. "Your grandmother hides the toilet roll because your Aunt Kathryn goes through it like no tomorrow."
What? How much toilet paper was my aunt using? Enough toilet paper to necessitate the extreme measure of hiding it?
Anyway, my mom didn't punishment or anything. Though I bet my grandmother got a surprise one day when she picked up the teddy bear and found a big poo stain on it.
The haunted house
There was a haunted house ride at Alton Towers. I’d never been on before. Mom, Dad, Corryn and I were all going on the ride.
We all got into a little car. Then the car started going moving.
It was dark. Very dark. I couldn’t see anything.
Then ghosts and monsters started appearing. Zombies and spiders. I heard an evil laugh.
I couldn’t take any more. “I want to get off!” I cried.
"We can’t get off,” laughed my dad. “We’ll have to wait until the ride is finished.”
There were more ghosts and monsters. A witch laughed above me. I closed my eyes tight.
Next, I heard the Ghostbusters theme song.
“Look, Paul, it’s Slimer from Ghostbusters!” said Mom.
I liked Slimer from Ghostbusters. But I still didn't open my eyes. This ride was too scary.
Dad saw me with my eyes closed. “Open your eyes, Paul,” said Dad.
“No!” I said.
“Why not?” asked Dad.
I didn’t want to admit that I was scared so instead, I said, “I’ve got something in my eye! My eye hurts!”
“No you don’t,” said Dad.
“I do! I have something in my eye!” I cried.
Finally, the ride was over and it was time to get off.
I was crying. “There’s something in my eye!” I was still saying. No one believed me.
The magic show
I once watched a magic show with my dad. It was in a big theatre. At the end of the show, the magician said, “For my last trick I’m going to disappear.” However, I misheard this and thought he said, "I’m going to make everyone disappear.”
This scared me. He was going to make everyone disappear?
I tugged on Dad’s sleeve.
“Dad, Dad,” I whispered urgently. “He said he’s going to make us all disappear.”
“Shh,” whispered Dad. “Let’s watch the end of the show.”
The magician was asking his assistant to help him with a box.
I tugged on Dad’s sleeve again. “Dad, Dad,” I whispered. “Can we go?”
“No,” replied Dad. “Let’s stay to the end of the show.”
The magician was getting into the box.
I tugged on Dad’s sleeve again. “Dad, Dad,” I whispered. But now he was ignoring me.
What could I do? The magician was about to make me, Dad and the rest of the audience disappear.
So I decided to hide under my seat. The magician couldn’t get me there, I thought.
“Get up off the floor,” said Dad.
“No,” I said. “I like it down here.”
“Come on now, get up the floor,” said Dad.
“No,” I said defiantly.
“Paul, the magician is finishing his trick. Don’t you want to see how it ends?”
“No!” I said.
So I hid under my chair. I was sure that at any moment, my dad and the rest of the audience were going to disappear and I would be left all alone in the theatre. Then I would have to run outside and find someone and tell them what happened.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, the show ended, and people clapped and started to leave.
I was still alive! I promised myself that from that day on, I would live life to the fullest, and never take another second for granted. But just five minutes later, I was kicking a bench because I was bored, so I failed to keep my promise.
Father Christmas
One Christmas Eve, my dad shouted, “Quick, Paul! Get to the window! I can see Father Christmas! Run, quick!”
So I ran to the window to see Father Christmas.
"I can't see him!" I said.
“There!” Dad shouted, now pointing to the sky. “There, do you see him? He’s flying in the sky with his reindeer!”
“I don’t see him! Where is he?!”
“There, Paul! Look! There he is!” Dad was pointing up to the empty night sky.
“But I don’t see him!” I said.
“There!” said Dad.
“Where??”
“Oh, he’s gone. He’s gone over that house.”
I started crying. “I didn’t see Father Christmas!” I wailed. I really was upset because I hadn't seen Father Christmas.
The Opal Fruits
When I was eight years old there was a fete at my sister's school. My mom gave me 20p to spend on whatever I wanted.
I went to the first stall I saw. It was a lucky dip. There was a girl and a boy running the stall. They were talking to each other.
I held out my 20 pence piece. They noticed me. They laughed at me. The boy took my 20 pence piece. Then they carried on talking to each other as if I was no longer there.
I reached my young hand into the lucky dip. It was a big box filled with shredded paper. I reached in and pulled out the first thing I lay my hands on.
It was an Opal Fruit. A single Opal Fruit.
I thought to myself, that can’t be the prize, surely? So I reached into the box of shredded paper to have another go.
"Hey! What do you think you're doing?" said the boy. Now the boy and the girl were both looking at me. They were angry.
I was scared. I started to walk away. The boy and girl laughed at me. In my hand was my single Opal Fruit.
I found Mom. “Mom, Mom,” I said. “I did a lucky dip and it cost me 20p, but I only won one Opal Fruit.”
I showed her the Opal Fruit, still in its green wrapper.
“Oh dear,” she said. “But look what I just bought.” In her hand was an entire packet of Opal Fruits. She'd bought them at another stall for 15p.
So that fucking lucky dip was a rip-off.
Bum bum pinch pinch
“Time for bed, Paul,” Dad would say.
“No!” I’d say back.
“Time for bed, Lisa,” Dad would say.
“No!” Lisa would say back.
“Time for bed, Adam,” Dad would say.
“No!” Adam would say back.
So Dad would say “Bum bum pinch pinch,” while pinching his fingers. You try it. Pinch your fingers and say, “Bum bum pinch pinch.”
Lisa, Adam and I would scream and run up the stairs. As we ran up the stairs, Dad would chase us while saying “Bum bum pinch pinch” over and over while trying to pinch our bums. It was his way of getting us to go to bed.
The itching powder
One summer, we went on a caravan holiday. I went off with some money and found a little shop where I bought a packet of itching powder. My plan was to put it in everyone's beds.
But my mom found it in my pocket.
"What's this? ITCHING POWDER? Where did you get this?"
I told her about the shop where I'd got it. Then she dragged me to the shop. There, the old lady behind the till was surprised to see us.
“You sold my son this itching powder?! He was planning to put it in our beds!” she said. “We’re in a caravan! We can’t just get clean sheets!”
So I never got to try my itching powder. A shame.
The salt and the sugar
One day I decided to have a little fun by swapping the salt and the sugar. When my mom made a cup of tea, put a spoon of salt in (thinking it was sugar), tasted it, and said, “This tastes weird.”
She called the Water Agency, thinking there was a problem with the water. They came and took samples from pipes outside but they couldn't find any problems. Eventually, I had to admit that I'd swapped the salt and the sugar.
The cup of water
I had seen on TV that you could make your dad wet his pants by putting his hand in a glass of water while he’s asleep.
So I waited until my dad was asleep and then put his hand into a glass of water. He immediately woke up.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m putting your hand into water,” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
“To make you wet yourself.”
“Oh,” he said, and then went back to sleep.
He never did wet himself so the television lied.
Corryn and the doll
My sister Lisa once had a giant, life-sized doll. This doll was scary. It was like Annabel
One night, my dad hid the doll in Lisa's bed. Then he said to my other sister, Corryn, "Go and check on Lisa."
Corryn said, "Why?"
"Go and see if she's asleep," said my dad.
So Corryn climbed the stairs to go see if Lisa was asleep. Little did she know that Lisa was actually wide-awake, in the bathroom, brushing her teeth.
When Corryn reached Lisa's bed, she saw a figure lying under the duvet that she presumed was Lisa. But when she pulled the cover back, she saw it wasn't Lisa - it was the evil doll. Corryn ran down the stairs screaming. My dad laughed a lot but I thought it was a mean trick to play.
The magic sock portal
At night, I would take my socks off in bed, and in the morning, the socks were always gone. I could never find them.
My guess was there was a magical portal in my bed and the socks were going through the portal to another dimension.
You know, some people have a hot water bottle in their bed? Well, I had a magic sock portal.
But when I was older, I discovered the truth. There wasn’t a magic portal after all. What was happening was I would take my socks off in the bed, and then I would kick the socks off the bed in my sleep. The socks were falling off down the side of the bed. Then, in the morning, my mom would come into my bedroom, pick up the socks and put them in the washing basket.
So there you go. That solved the mystery of the magic sock portal.
The river of gold
When I was a kid, Mom and Dad would take us on holiday to Wales. One of the places in Wales was Bryngarw Park. There was a stream, and in that stream were rocks that glittered. The rocks looked like they had little specks of gold in them.
"That's gold," Dad said.
"Gold!" I exclaimed.
I took off my socks and shoes and walked into the stream. Lisa and Adam followed me.
I picked up a rock from the water.
"How much is this rock worth, Dad?" I shouted while waving the rock at him.
"£10," he shouted back.
"£10!" I cried. "Wow!"
I couldn't believe our good luck. I had just found £10 worth of gold! We were going to be rich!
I picked up a bigger rock.
"How much is this one worth, Dad?"
"£20," he shouted back.
"£20!" I said. It was incredible. We were going to be millionaires!
Lisa was the next to pick one up. "How much is this one worth, Dad?" she asked while holding her rock in the air.
"£30," said Dad.
"£30!" Lisa and I cried with glee. We weren’t just going to be millionaires. We were going to be billionaires!
I started taking the rocks out of the water. My plan was to bring all the rocks back to the car, and then later, we would sell them and BE RICH!
But Mom and Dad made me put all the rocks back.
"We're not allowed to take rocks from here," said Mom. "The rocks belong here."
"Can't we just take a few?" I asked. "They're worth a lot of money. There’s gold in them."
But no, Mom and Dad said we couldn't take them.
And that was how we all missed our chance at becoming billionaires.
The fireworks
One Bonfire Night, Dad put some fireworks in a bucket in the middle of the garden. We were all watching him from the patio.
"Be careful Carl!" shouted my mom.
"Be careful your fucking self," he muttered as he lit the fireworks.
Then, just as he was backing off, the bucket of fireworks fell over.
Instead of picking the bucket back up, like a normal person, my dad screamed "GET BACK INSIDE!" and started sprinting back across the garden.
We all dove inside the conservatory. My mom slammed the door shut just as all the rockets went off.
It was like World War II. Rockets bombarded our little wooden conservatory with colourful sparks and fire.
Then my sister shouted, “The tree’s on fire!”
We looked and one of the trees was on fire. It was from where one of the rockets had landed in the tree.
I fully expected the house to burn down that night, but the fire went out on its own, thank God. My Mega Drive was in that house.
The Batman figure
My brother Adam had a Batman figure. He loved the Batman figure. He played with it every day. One day, he was throwing it up and down in the conservatory, and he threw it up and - hey! Where did it go? The Caped Crusader was nowhere to be seen. It wasn't on the floor, it wasn't on the couch, it wasn't anywhere. Adam called Mom and Dad for help, but they couldn't find Batman either. Batman had vanished.
Ten years later, the mystery was finally solved: while Dad was cleaning the conservatory, he took a wicker basket from the wall and there was Batman, lying inside the basket. He'd landed in the basket and had been there for a decade. He didn't look a day older, except now he had a heavy coating of dust.
The mud
One day, my sister Lisa and I were playing in the garden. In the garden next to ours, the neighbour had five beautiful white sheets hanging up to dry.
“Lisa,” I said.
“Yes?” said Lisa.
“Let’s throw mud at the sheets,” I said.
So I picked up some dirt and threw it at one of the sheets. It hit the sheet and left a big brown stain.
Lisa laughed. She picked up some dirt and threw it at the sheet. It left another brown stain.
We carried on doing this until the sheets were full of dark brown dirt stains.
We went back inside. Goosebumps was on the television. I was happy because it was an episode about a scarecrow that comes to life and I hadn’t seen that episode.
Mom came into the living room. She was angry.
“Did you and Lisa throw mud at the neighbour's sheets?” she asked.
My eyes were glued to the television screen. I wanted her to go away so I could watch Goosebumps, so I nodded.
“How could you do that, Paul?” she shouted. “Now I have to clean all of the sheets in the washing machine!”
I ignored her and kept watching Goosebumps. Though I did feel a bit bad for what I’d done.
The bus
When I was eleven, I started at a secondary school called Bishop Vesey’s.
I had to get a bus there because it was so far away.
I used to stand at the bus stop in the morning. I was supposed to stick my arm out to make the bus stop, but I was never very good at this. I would always stick my arm out too late. The bus driver would just drive right past me and the other school children on the bus would look at me through the windows and laugh at me.
I told Mom what had happened.
“Mom, the bus driver didn’t stop for me today. So I had to wait for the next bus.”
She was shocked. She phoned the bus company and complained.
The next day, I walked to the bus stop. And I waited.
And out of the corner of my eye, I saw something - it wasn’t the bus, it was our car, and sitting in it was Mom. She was watching me. She had driven to the bus stop to make sure I would get on the bus.
The bus came. The driver stopped at my stop. He opened the door.
“Are you the boy whose mom called to complain?” he said with a gruff voice.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Well, get on then,” he said.
And I never had any problems with the bus after that. And for several days after, my mom kept driving to the bus stop to make sure I got on the bus.
The tap
One year, before we went on holiday, I thought it would be a good idea to leave the tap on. Not running, just dripping slightly. So I left the bathroom tap like that: drip drip drip drip drip.
I wanted to see how much water would be in the sink when we got back from holiday a week later.
Well, a week later, when we finally arrived home, my dad went into the bathroom and went, "Oh my god! The bathroom is flooded!"
The sink had overflowed and there was water all over the floor.
Mom went into the bathroom. "Oh my god!” she said. “The floor is ruined! How did this happen?”
They had to replace all the linoleum of the bathroom and everything.
I didn’t say anything. And I never did. My dad still doesn’t know that it was me who left the tap dripping.
The time I fell off my bike
When I was about 14, I went out on my bike. On Tyburn Road, I started going fast down the hill. I was going so fast but the handlebars started wobbling and I lost control and fell off. I lost some of the skin on the left hip. None of the cars stopped to see if I was okay. I walked his bike home which thankfully was only a five-minute walk away. Mom was at home and she was shocked when she saw me. She said she could see my hip bone through the hole. The bone was white. She took me to the hospital. There, we had to wait for about six hours to be seen by a nurse who stitched it back up.
The gnome
Growing up, we had a next-door neighbour called Andrew.
He was the same age as Lisa. He and Adam were friends. He would come round our house and play.
He had big thick glasses and ginger hair. He also wore special pegs on his legs for a while.
Dad gave him a nickname: “Spudman”.
One day I decided to play a trick on Adam and Spudman. While they were playing behind the shed, I picked up a gnome from the garden. It was a creepy looking gnome.
I crept up to the shed, where Adam and Spudman were playing. Then I poked the gnome out and started moving it around.
Adam and Spudman screamed like little girls. They must really have thought the gnome had come to life! They clutched each other as they screamed.
I jumped out and laughed. “Ha ha ha ha.”
Today, my brother says I later smashed the gnome with a slipper (?) but I don't remember that, so I reckon he's made it up to make me feel bad.
The ants
Our kitchen used to have ants every summer. And not just ordinary ants. These were big ants. These ants were about three times the size of an ordinary ant. And these ants could fly!
Every summer they'd appear in the kitchen. They'd crawl over the bread bin picking up crumbs. We suspected they lived under the fridge somewhere. So my mom put down ant poison. But it didn't work. The poison didn't affect the ants. If anything, it made them stronger. Now we had mutant ants. Mutant ants who were angry because we'd tried to poison them.
I used to wake up in the morning and start getting ready for school. I was the first one up because my school was far away and I had to catch a bus to get there. I would start pulling the cord to open the roller blinds in the kitchen, to let the sun in - and ants would fall out the blinds! Some of the ants would go into the blinds during the night for some reason. Maybe they thought there was food there. "MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!" I'd shout up the stairs. This probably woke everyone up but I shouted anyway. Probably I was scared because all these giant mutant flying ants had just fallen out of the blinds. "THERE'S AAAAAAANTS!" Mom would come down the stairs wearing a nightgown and start killing them. She had a special ant spray that was designed to kill them.
One morning, I opened the blinds and ants fell out. Giant mutant flying ants. I decided not to call Mom this time and that I'd handle it myself, like a man. So I took a square sheet of kitchen paper and started killing the ants. I would put the kitchen paper over the ant and then squish the ant to death with my finger. The kitchen paper was there so I didn't have to touch the ant directly. I kept count of how many I killed that morning. It was over a hundred. After I'd killed one, I'd see another, and another. There was always another.
Tapas
A new restaurant opened up nearby. It was called a "tapas" restaurant. None of us was really sure what "tapas" meant but for some reason, we went anyway.
The plates of food came. They were small. Dad was disappointed. "If you're paying for a meal then they should bring meal-sized portions. That's it: end of story."
We ordered olives. None of us had tried olives before. The plate of olives came. None of us wanted to be the first to try one. I bravely tried one. It tasted weird.
"You have to try olives eight times before you'll like them," said Dad.
"Why?" I asked, naively expecting to get an actual explanation.
"Well, because that's how many times before your body acquires the taste."
"But why eight?" I asked.
"It's what they say," said Dad.
"It's what who says?"
"You know," said Dad. "The scientists. Dieticians. It's the same with any food: Eight times."
My Dad doesn't know any scientists or dieticians.
The big poo
One year, I went with my family to Greece. Our diet for the week consisted of little but gyros pittas, a Greek speciality made of chicken, bread, and white sauce. After a week of eating gyros pittas, I was so constipated I thought I'd never poo again.
But on the seventh day, we were walking along a beach when I felt a strange gurgling in my intestines. I knew immediately what it was: it was the poo, wanting to come out and see the world. I looked around frantically for a toilet but there was not a single toilet within a five-mile radius.
"Are you okay Paul?" asked my mom. "You seem quiet."
"Yeah, fine," I lied, because, as everyone knows, if there's something even more embarrassing as a teenager than shitting yourself, it's disclosing embarrassing information to your family.
I clenched my bum cheeks shut and waddled along the beach with my family, pretending everything was okay.
We walked along the beach for half an hour later until we finally came to a restaurant. It was, of course, a gyros pitta restaurant.
"Shall we have a gyros pitta?" asked my dad.
Never had I heard such glorious words spoken. Not because I wanted a gyros pitta, but so I could use the toilet.
We went inside. The restaurant owner was a fat greasy-looking man with hairy arms and a dark beard.
"Do you want a gyros pitta?" the man asked me.
"No, I want to use your toilet," I said.
He gestured to the back of the restaurant, where an old door lay off its hinges. I penguin-walked as fast as I could to the door with my bum clenched. The bathroom was a small, hot, dingy room with one bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. I lifted the toilet lid and immediately saw the most horrendous sight I've ever seen in my life. In the toilet was a mass of intertwined stools, amalgamated over time due to repeated use of the toilet without flushing. I could only guess that the toilet flush had broken and no one had even bothered to fix it.
But beggars cannot be choosers and my poo was already peeking its head out my bumhole so I dropped my trousers and pants and sat down on the dirty toilet seat (probably catching various parasites as I did so). The floodgates opened and out of my bum came the biggest poo I'd ever done. I practically had to hold onto the toilet bowl to avoid going airborne.
When I stood up, I was careful not to look in the toilet because I was afraid of what I might see there. As you know, what has been seen can never be unseen, no matter how much counselling you have. But then I looked in the toilet anyway. And what I saw was atrocious. On top of the pre-existing poo was now a huge pile of my poo, which itself was immense by anyone's standards. It was a week's worth of my poo sitting on top of a huge mound of other people's poo.
I wondered who the poo belonged to. It probably belonged to several Greek men with names like Anastasios, Antonio, Christos and Dimitrios. We were all in an unofficial club of men who had defecated into the same broken toilet. And what about the owner of the restaurant? Presumably, he was now preparing the kebab meat with his bare hands. Was he in this group too?
The toilet was almost overflowing with human faeces. I felt very sorry for whoever would have to clean all that up. And I also felt very glad it wasn't me.
Even though I knew the flush was probably broken, I tried the flush anyway. It didn't work.
I rejoined my family, who by now were seated at a table and had been oblivious to my turmoil. I kept my bathroom adventure to myself. We all ordered gyros pittas and I had one too.
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