Tasty Shit

“I can resist everything but temptation and boys,” said Stephen Fry wannabe Oscar Wilde one time whilst probably recovering from a clammy Caligulan orgy in a Whitechapel opium den. Personally, I can resist everything but temptation and cereal. At about three in the am, when the hotbox is at its hottest and hunger begins to strike, albeit with a distinct lack of perspiration from the saliva glands, only a bowl of Tesco’s Oat Crunch set upon a bed of yoghurt and a generous dusting of brown sugar will do.

Problem with this particular temptation is that I suffer from Crohn’s Disease, an auto-immune arse ailment which causes regular and er, sanguinary bowel movements exacerbated in my case by a precocious lactose intolerance, which means my days of suckling on Daisy’s mammary goodness are all but over. Except they’re not, and I’m often caught relapsing into a maizy utopia.

Needless to say, I suffer in the mornings. Crohn’s has meant that the peculiar yet strangely crossover idiosyncrasy of inspecting one’s poo has become an obsession, and I can oft be found, head down bowl as if diligently sweeping my shit for fingerprints.

It was there, somewhere between the U-bend and the toilet cookie, that it popped into my head – if a Jackson Pollock can get sold for £60 million, how much would someone pay me to eat my very own Jackson Pollock copy? Or for those who have never set foot into the Tate Modern, how much to eat my own poo?

I hate money. I hate spending it, I hate looking at it and I hate how much we all covet it in spite of the fact that it doesn’t compensate for ill health or lack of meaningful relationships in our lives. So, whilst I am acutely aware of the fact that money does not equate to happiness, the fact that I have none means it is often on my mind.

But whilst other people, in times of penury, dream the American Dream, think about promotions, new business ventures or inventions to embarrass themselves on Dragon’s Den with, I dream of a wealthy benefactor dangling a fiscal carrot in return for my dignity and a bad case of Hepatitis B.

And it’s taking me over. I was walking through the park the other morning picking up ingredients for a roast and I saw a couple of rapscallions in their mid-Twenties, sat on a park bench in their Sunday best of Lacoste trackie bottoms, Lacoste trackie top and Lacoste trainers, drinking a few cans of Nelson Mandela. A shower of spittle sprayed through the air from one of them and settled into the perennial trail of phlegm that can oft be seen accompanying a chav. I asked myself then, how much? How much to lick up that entire trail of chav-phlegm?

The tasks that my imaginary sugar-daddy sets me lead to greater degrees of degradation and ever more fleeting flights of fancy as I imagine all the toys that I could buy with all the money that I’m gonna get. I’m back to the days when I would meticulously scour the pages of the Argos catalogue at Christmas and circle everything I wanted from Santa before I left it ostentatiously on the living room table.

Then, like now, I end up with nothing. Because Santa doesn’t exist and neither does my sugar-daddy. The chances of getting hit by lightning are one in three million. The chances of winning the lottery are set at 14 million to one. There have been no reported cases of rich oligarchs paying people money for a series of degrading tasks. This means that on the balance of probability, I am more likely to get electrocuted whilst buying the winning lottery ticket than I am of ever being even asked to eat shit for millions.

A depraved version of the Apprentice where SrrrAlan, Nick and Margaret set bogie-eating tasks for twelve plucky hopefuls to battle it out for the chance to become SrrrAlan’s bitch is never going to happen (is it?).

The comforting thing in all of this is, no matter how much Daddy offers, I always say no. I will not eat my own poo for any amount of money. I will not lick up chav spittle for stacks of cash. I’m not here to make money, nice though it would be to have some. I like the fact that I’m skint. It means that dreaming about getting rich is always fun. It’s not the end, it’s the means to that end which make it all so worthwhile.

There’s that episode of Only Fools And Horses where the Trotters finally hit the jackpot, only for Del Boy to want to get involved in one last deal. And that’s the problem – getting rich is more fun than being rich, so when you get there, you wanna press restart and do it all again. We have an insatiable desire for more; it’s how we’re wired. It’s then that you ask yourself, how much shit do I have to eat before I’m done?