Still away. This week I’ve decided to go colour. These were my slants on the Thai government’s attempts to put gory photos on cigarette packets to dissuade smoking, on the national panic over genetically altered fruit, on why foreigners weren’t being shaken down by the coastguard, and on the meat menu at the new Safari Park in Chiang Mai.

When you get to read this semiblob I’ll be away at a secret location writing my next Dr. Siri book. So, in order to keep you both from wandering away from our weekly delights I’ve decided to send you a few old cartoons. As you’ve probably worked out from reading my books, I’m more of a cartoonist than a writer. Every day I turn on the computer hoping to find an offer from The New Yorker asking me to be their in-house picture guy. I’ve had my moments. Not that many years back I had a weekly strip in the Nation newspaper called Mann Farang. It dealt with local issues like the disappearance of Jim Thomson and why crocodiles allow themselves to be manhandled by idiot keepers. The weekly turned to a monthly and then to a ‘Don’t call us…’. Then there were social issue cartoons for magazines like how the new landscaping affected Chiang Mai, but never that big one to lure me away from writing. I’d gladly drop my pen in a second if I had a real cartoon job.

With all the talk about politics and history and bio-chemistry in my colleagues’ blobs these last few weeks I’m starting to feel like a bit of a light-weight. Not only am I second-to-last slack-head (ahead of only Guest Blobber) in the Blobbing Premier League tables you see to your right, I’m also perhaps the only person on the planet who hasn’t passed on my opinion of the democratic principles of governance in Southeast Asia. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of you out there might have the opinion that I’m a bit dim and lacking in insight on matters of major concern to the world. So, it’s time to address these misconceptions and put in my sixpenny worth on the topic of hemorrhoids. I apologize if you’re engaging in a meal right now and to make hemorrhoids easier to swallow, I’m including them together with a number of other ailments that concern old people like myself. Apart from probing the above, I shall also be bending over backwards in my expose of lumbar pain, following through on kidney stones, and straightening out a few knee misconceptions.

I shall take these topics in reverse order. When I was little, I recall my granny telling me that granddad’s knees had ‘gone again’. Me, being a curious six-year-old, would head off in search of them, being careful not accidentally crush them underfoot in my endeavors. Little did I know then that granddad’s knees would eventually catch up with me. I recently watched an excruciating movie called Bad Lieutenant. I cringed the whole way through it, not only because Nicholas Cage is such an awful actor, but because the character he almost played was suffering from chronic back pain. I could feel it every time he jumped onto Eva Mendez. ‘Don’t do it,” I’d shout, to no avail. Luckily for him he had access to heroin and cocaine. All I had was Aspirin. Suffering from kidney stones, as I have, becomes much worse when you hear a comedian on TV describe it as a blowfish passing down a rubber hose. And, yes, I’ve had hemorrhoids, buckets of ‘em. And I’m not ashamed to admit it.

But here’s the rub. All those old-person complaints hit me before I reached thirty. At the age of eighteen when all the other boys were out getting their first nooky-noodles, I got my first hemorrhoid. I worked out a lot so for the first few months I thought it was a new muscle. My coach had instilled the ‘no pain – no gain’ philosophy in the team so I know I gained a lot that year. My initiation in the world of kidney stones was at the tender age of twenty-five and they remained faithful compadres through to the age of fifty. But then I discovered a wonderful weed called ‘Cat’s Whiskers grass’ and I haven’t weed a blowfish since. (No, I do not own the CWG rights nor have the owners paid me a handsome fee for promoting their product. It really is magic.). I didn’t get my first dodgy knee till I was 29. It had something to do with me training for marathons I never had any hope of winning. Nobody remembers the runner up in a race. The doctor told me my left knee was degenerating. I took this to mean it was ageing rapidly and I wondered what I’d ever done to my left knee to make it get old before the rest of me. At thirty my back went out for the first time. (presumably in search of granddad’s knees). So you see, I was an old guy even before I’d had a chance to sample middle-age.

I realize I still have a lot to look forward to; not the least of these is when my bowels decide they’re taking over the decision making on when to evac. But I’ve weathered greater deluges. I’ve had hepatitis, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis, bronchitis, tuberculosis, appendicitis and myxomatosis. But they all passed. I’m through the worst of it. I have survived. For the last five years I haven’t had anything more serious than a cold. Last weekend I kayaked forty kilometers down the Lang Suan river. Yes it almost killed me but we’ll show those body parts who’s in charge here. Our local fortune teller told me that if I didn’t die unnaturally in my fifties (I have two years to go), I’d die a natural death in my nineties. I think she’s misunderestimating me. The newspaper today said that with recent advances in medicine and technology, the first person on the planet to reach one thousand might have already been born. I think it was talking about me.

You probably think I’d be sick of that question after the sixtieth time of hearing it but I’m not. I look forward to it. I love it. it’s my favourite question. Even more favourite than, “Do you have any special clothes you wear when you’re writing?” and, “What’s the very first word you ever wrote?” (Mauve flannelette jimjams and  ‘mummi’ respectively in case you were curious). The reason I like it so much is that I can try out more and more outrageous answers every time.

I once told a gentleman in the audience that I go to second-hand bookshops and buy a dozen novels nobody’s ever heard of, take them home and steal all the good ideas. I thought he’d be disappointed but he merely took notes, nodded his head knowingly and smiled. If I remember rightly his name was Dave Brown, or Don or Dan. Something like that.

I’ve tried the, “I get disgracefully drunk and when I  wake up in the morning I find scribbled notes all over the house chock full of ideas. (In fact this version was a little too close to the truth so I only used it once.) But that answer naturally morphed into the channeling of Agatha Christi. I sit in a darkened room, a pen poised above a notepad and I go “Ohm” for an hour. Agatha steers my hand across the pages.

I have shorter responses for those events where they only give me three minutes of Q&A:

“I find them on the refrigerator door.”

“I get them from my dog who used to be Ernest Hemmingway.”

“I have them delivered.”

“I eat a lot of pickled onions.”

“Actually it’s just the one idea written in different sitting positions.”

I never fail to amuse myself with my answers to the WDYGYIF? question. And the good news is that people who ask it have no concept of sarcasm. “I asked him, Mother, and he said he gets them from his dog. Who’d have thought it?” The only answer I haven’t yet given is the true one. And, viewers, it’s your lucky night because here, in a rare moment of exclusivity, for your eyes only in this blob, I am going to divulge my source. As with all good sources it comes with a little spice and takes some shaking to get it out of the bottle. But here goes.

A few years ago I started to lose my mind. No, don’t laugh. It’s not funny. Hot on the tail of my mind went my memory. Finding myself with neither a mind nor a memory complicated every day chores like kissing whoever that was beside me in the bed every morning claiming to be my wife. Like confusing hair gel and toothpaste even though they contain subtle clues in their titles. Like writing to tell my fans how pleased I am that they enjoy my Harry Potter series.

But every cloud has a silver lining and little crystal chandeliers. As my memory shriveled to a juiceless grape my imagination became a huge pregnant watermelon of the bizarre. There are a number of precedents on record of people losing one sense (as opposed to me who lost all of them) and being compensated by mother nature in another area. Stevie Wonder lost his sight as a baby but his left leg grew four inches longer than his right. Concert pianist Merslov Digitzeroski lost both his hands in a lawn mower accident but learned to play the harp with his nose. Michael Jackson has been dead for several months but he just signed a 270 million dollar contract with Sony to keep producing albums. And I lost my mind and was compensated with an almost unfingerable dyke of ideas. They come at me all the time from all directions. My brain fluid is LSD. I dream of a time when my imagination will just give me a few seconds rest. The woman claiming to be my wife is sick of it. “What time is it, Colin?”

“Here or on the planet Bongk where there are only five minutes in a day?”

“Forget it.”

There. You heard it here first, folks.

I suppose it’s just as well that Mr. Gillette started to put his blades in those little plastic cartridges because once they’ve read this week’s blob, more than a few publishers will be reaching for razors. You see, I have a confession to make. When I intimated that I liked the covers you put on my books, I lied. I’m sorry. I often go out of my way to not hurt other people’s feelings to the point that I make myself a miserable wretch. I know I didn’t exactly say the words, “I like it,” but I may have been too free with expressions like, “It has a certain unrestricted simplicity”, or “It’s rather interesting”, or, “It’s orange”.

I need to begin this confessional by pointing out that, unless you’re somebody with literary weight (my own weight being merely flab) your publisher won’t send you a cover and say, “Tell us what you think and we’ll make all the changes you recommend.” Heaven forbid that they should ask you to design the thing in the first place. They actually have first and final say on the cover. They have a little trick. They tell you that everyone at the publishing house (including the tea lady and the man who cleans the drains) and the marketing department and ‘the industry’ all love it. Then they’ll say, “What do you think?” Of course you aren’t going to tell the truth after such a build up. You aren’t going to alienate an editor who has probably put several minutes into the selection of stock photographs and gone down the Dulux paint chart to find a colour for the title that matched. She’s the expert. (Notice I didn’t put that in inverted commas cause editors pick up on little details like that.) With one or two very rare exceptions, I have hated the covers they put on my books. They’re either twiddley, arty, flowery McCall Smith look-alikes that make those not-in-the-know believe Colin Cotterill is the nom de plume of an ageing lady horse rider with pink hair from Sussex, or they stick on Asian postcard pictures, irrespective of what country they’re taken in. Of course the photographers and artists have produced beautiful work but I don’t want their pictures stuck on the front of my books any more than they’d want my prose plastered across their living room walls. They aren’t how I see my books.

“So”, you ask, “how do you see your books, Colin?” Good question. The two words that come to mind are, ‘dark’ and ‘funny’. My novels describe gruesome murders and tortures; gore with a whimsical twist. I don’t want to be responsible for giving some chronic heart patient that final push when he picks up a book with bicycles and flowers on the cover and comes across a man’s head being split open against a tree. No, I’d go the black humour route. You remember the photos in the movie: The Others, with Nicole Kidman? The photos of the dead, dressed up and posed? In the Victorian era they used to go to all kinds of extremes like having their dead sister in her best party dress propped up on an unseen wooden stand in the family group pic. Professional morgue workers used to come along and draw on smiles and paint open eyes on the departed’s eyelids. I think that is extremely cool. So my covers would feature an obviously dead – preferably beginning to rot – body, shot from above, perhaps in a grass-lined grave or a coffin completely filling the cover. There would be some comedic element to the photo like the corpse playing a guitar in death with a pick between his teeth, or listening to a walkman and wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt.

Which brings me to my next point. The kinds of books I’d buy because of the cover are probably not those selected by the vast majority of readers. This, I grant you, might have an influence on the marketing department. The only covers I’ve been moderately attracted to were those produced by Random House Canada. They looked like real books, not cut and paste primary school art projects. They were quirky and colourful and had my name in big type just like the ones you see in the shops – and four books into the series they dumped my arse because nobody was buying them. Unceremoniously hacked. Could I be wrong about covers? I self-published a book of short stories recently with a ‘different’ cover I’d put together myself. I loved it. iUniverse sold four copies. Despite that, it was picked up by a real publisher and the first thing they told me to do was change the cover. They let me paint it myself but to their specifications and I still don’t like it so it’ll probably do very well.

But my taste bodes ominously for the cover you see to the right of this blob. It’s book seven, LOVE SONGS FROM A SHALLOW GRAVE, the final book in the Soho version of the Dr. Siri series (Although they have the option to buy the continuing series from the UK) and it’s as close as they’ve come to my taste. A stark, black mysterious cover that leaves the buyer asking, “What stark, black mystery lies within the pages of this book?” I’m tempted to think they’re trying to scuttle me. “We’ll teach him for fleeing to England” they think. We’ll do him a stark mysterious cover and show him just how many Goths waste their Edward and the Squashing Little Fluffy Animals CD money on cozy crime novels. So, I guess it’s time to start going through the sits-vacant ads. I’ll see you all on the street sometime. Or, alternatively, you could all prove me wrong and arrest my decline by rushing out and buying the book.

I lost a certain amount of my philanthropic cred when I announced at the local post office that I wouldn’t be sending a cheque off to Thai-Haiti relief fund. One little old lady who sells bananas at the local market was in there turning her four dollars worth of change into a money order. She’d been collecting coins from the other traders and wanted to do her bit for the starving Haitians. Being Thai, she merely smiled when I made my stinginess public but I knew what she was thinking. “Cheap bloody foreigner”. Here was an entire country stirred into a national frenzy by all those pop singers and soap stars corralled by guilt to appear on telethons. Once more they’d been able to momentarily pierce the ‘its not my problem’ armour of the viewing public. All those donors could sleep soundly ‘cause they’d done their charity for the year. The Lord Buddha be praised.

As sorry as I feel about the untold hardships thrust upon the Haitians, I’m afraid I’m not the type to get that rare urge to empty my wallet whenever the international entertainment world gets a benevolent spurt on. A flurry of ‘We are the world.’ doesn’t do it for me. I’m a rich guy who was once a poor guy and, as such I’m permeated with a constant urge to help people like the old me. Oh, I was never smelling bad and panhandling in front of fancy restaurants, nor was I stateless and petrified and sold into slavery on deep sea fishing vessels. But I’ve been unemployed and counting out three noodles a day till I could be sure there’d be another packet for next week. So altruism isn’t a debt that plagues me; it’s in my job description as a functioning member of the world community.

I subscribe to a principle of charity – if not beginning at home – at least starting around the next door neighbour’s back garden. There are some five thousand Burmese day labourers living in our area, some, through one of those quirks of nature I’ve never really come to grips with, have produced children. Despite the fact that Burmese have been living here for many years and contribute immensely to the Thai economy, none of those kids have ever been to school. There’s a Thai law that says all foreign children living on Thai soil have a right to go to school but anyone who’s spent time here will tell you there’s law and then there’s non-fiction. So Jess and I bought some books, hired a teacher and rented a space. Thirty kids are now learning to read how their country is being gobbled up by fat generals and to calculate how much they’re being ripped off by their Thai employers. It means we can no longer run the lawn sprinklers and we’ve had to let our Pilates instructor go and we’ll have to do without that talking bathroom scale we’d so had our hearts on, but life is all about sacrifices.

The banana lady lives in the middle of the same community we do and for ten years has watched the Burmese kids hang around waiting for that glorious day when they can be uneducated criminals and prostitutes. But because the Thai version of George Clooney didn’t tell her to dip into her purse she kept her blinkers on awaiting that glorious day when she could help the starving Haitians. And, generous though she’s been, I fear for where her four dollars might end up. I briefly worked for the UN and I have constant nightmares that feature a three-thousand dollar vacuum cleaner with curtain tassel and shag carpet attachments taking six months to be delivered from Sweden to our little UNESCO supported education project in Laos. If I knew someone in Haiti I’d stick some cash in an envelope and mail it to them as we did to friends in tsunami-hit Phuket. But my suspicious self tells me there’ll be a lot of nouveaux riche public officials in the Caribbean in the not too distant future.

The myth of the magic bubble of international aid has never been popped with a more pointed needle than it was in Graham Hancock’s excellent book, Lords of Poverty. The author reminds us, “Another serious problem, also not beyond the bounds of human ingenuity to solve, is the sheer number of different kinds of organisation that flock like benign vultures to the scene of every Third World catastrophe. Leaving aside for a moment the private charities which, by definition, are a diffuse and scattered bunch with widely differing skills and concerns, it is a little-known fact that there are at least sixteen specialized United Nations agencies which can become involved in disaster relief activities; frequently, they all do so at the same time…treading heavily on each other’s toes, bickering violently amongst themselves…”

So, kindhearted fellows, let us take a leaf out of Dr. Siri’s book and do the little charities well. “Forget the planet: save the garden.”

They’re coming.

From the north with their hard man Jett Lee countenances and their eat-to-excess karaoke restaurants, and their Mekhong river dredgers and their mini-skirted, short chunky legs, they’re coming.

They’re coming. From the south they’re coming. With their almost Lao, we’re-brothers-under-the-skin rhetoric and their rotating door governments and their cross-dressing TV shows and their skin-whitening creams, they’re coming.

From the east and the west, they’re coming. With their bleached highlights and their designer ethnic wear and their Lonely Planet security blankets, loud voices, I-wish-we’d-left-the-kitchen-sink-at-home backpacks, wash-off tattoos, e-mail addictions and impossible empathy, they’re coming.

They’re boldly coming to where they think no man has come before, seeking out new lies and new uncivilizations. Exploring a strange new world: Laos, the final frontier.

I lived in Laos in better times. Not better for the Lao, I must say, the Lao who struggled to make a living. Whose government officials sold pond fish at the market before work because they hadn’t been paid for three months. Whose college students washed their one white shirt over and over until it became transparent. Whose soldiers fought in flip flops and whose housewives cooked bees and frogs and snakes because the markets were empty. No, those weren’t better times for the Lao. But for people like me who were escaping from ‘civilization’ it was the perfect place. Two cars passing at the same time would be considered traffic. Dust would blow up from the streets and leave the old, once-white buildings with a brown blush. Girls on the street would think to smile then remember that someone might be watching, writing down, reporting. But I felt as if that pace and simplicity were meant for me. Laos was never an easy place to live but I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions that the happiest and most miserable scenes of my life have all taken place in that theatre of the bizarre. It was as if the complications and pleasures of the world had all been stripped down to their basics.

I never know what to expect when I step off the Lao Aviation flight from Bangkok but these days I’ve come to expect less. It all begins with the list of charges at the Visa On Arrival desk. What high-level meeting decided that an Aussie should pay a dollar less than a Swede? Only in Laos, they say. I sat on what used to be the bank of the Mekhong but all I could see was two-hundred yards of building site. They’ve filled in half the river to make a road. So what that Sri Chiang Mai opposite turns into Venice for three months a year? I walk through the nighttime streets where badly made-up transvestites lurch out of the shadows at me like Living Dead zombies. Jumbo drivers offer me drugs and sex, then swear at me when I refuse politely in Lao. I can get every movie and TV series ever produced for a dollar a DVD and pick up a Chinese Sonely player, (guaranteed to last till just before you get it home) at the Morning Market Mall.

The invaders are causing untold damage. The kids don’t know which is their culture any more. By far the worst programmes on satellite are the Lao ones – women in uniform talking about cattle and coffee beans, self-conscious mo lum singers doing poor imitations of their Thai counterparts – so none of the youngsters choose to be Lao. They used to shout, “Hello, Soviet” at me in the good old days, now they say, “Hi, man!” and high-five me. They tease their hair into Thai punk and wear T-shirts from Kunming with dirty words they can’t read across their little chests.

It was naïve of me to think the place might maintain the simplicity and innocence I’d fallen for twenty years earlier. My good old days weren’t theirs but there are so few places to visit now where time has stalled and then started to run in reverse. People eat better now and have more than one shirt to wear, but now the clock is running forward at twice the pace and I see them tumbling along in a swirling deluge of the unfamiliar. I feel like pinning up fliers on lampposts asking people to help me find my lost Laos. The final frontier is being breached. Phasers on repel, Mr. Spock.

I am sending off this blob a week early because I have been summoned to Vientiane by the International School who have agreed to pay my airfare and accommodation in return for a twenty-minute live oral blob. They expect me to stand up in front of a hall full of three hundred parents, diplomats and politicians and expound. They expect me to wow them with my witty repartee and leave them with a moral. Somehow, when I think of it like that, free airfare and a bar fridge doesn’t sound like that much of a prize.

To be honest, one of the reasons I started to write was the distant dream that I could be reclusive. I had hopes that I would be a moderately unsuccessful writer who had to spend all his free time churning out novels just to make a living. No tours. No public speaking. I had my sights set on the bottom rung of ‘the list’ just above all those self-published “Look How Fascinating My Life Was” authors whose total sales come from relatives and harangued ex-school friends. Sadly, I became a megastar and hopes that I’d never have to stand up in front of people and ‘entertain’ them faded away with my first seven-figure royalty cheque. (Decimal points count as figures, do they not?) I was a household name and the world wanted me.

My first ever performance as a published author was in front of eleven people (four of them staff) at the Mystery Bookstore in Huston, Texas. As I had never been to an author event I didn’t know how to behave. I took my glass of wine to the front of the room, sat on a stool and waited for something to happen. The audience, not knowing who I was, were also waiting for something to happen. Consequently, nothing happened for a good three minutes. I slurped wine. They watched me slurp. One of the staff, feeling uncomfortable, broke the ice with a profound question. “Could you tell our customers who you are and what you write?” And so began my first ever author tour. I have to say that the more famous I became, the fewer people turned up to listen to me. I am not a very engaging speaker. In order to distract the audiences’ attention from this fact, I put together a power-point display with cartoons and photographs and I found that it did my entertaining for me. Audiences barely noticed me. If I’d shot somebody during my talk I doubt anyone would have been able to give the police a description. My highlight was a full production power-point spectacular to two people at a huge bookshop in Chicago. Not even the staff could be bothered to turn up. It was the evening I enjoyed most on the tour.

The irony here is that I was a teacher for most of my professional life. I’ve spent more hours at the chalk face than Frank McCourt. My last professional engagement as a lecturer was a course called, “Oral Improvisation and Performance’ (tee hee). How could I bluff MA students into believing I was a powerful orator yet wilt like a dry daisy when I’m on the road on my own? I can put it down to only one thing. When I taught I was always using someone else’s material. I didn’t invent the English language and I had no investment in it. If it was wrong it wasn’t my fault. If I trained social workers I was using well accepted theories, none of which I made up. But when I’m doing author tours the material is me: Colin Cotterill. I have to talk about myself, answer questions about my feelings. Even my wife doesn’t know some of the things I told four hundred people in Harrogate last year. I have become the subject and I’m sure you’ve read somewhere, unlike other nationalities I won’t mention, Englishmen are reluctant to go into detail about their personal lives with four hundred complete strangers. Is it any wonder I give conflicting information at each event?

Oh, what a ways I’ve come since those early days. How many more times do I have to turn down Oprah? Can’t the BBC just leave me alone for a week or two? And here I am off to Laos for the top hat and tie social event of the Vientiane calendar. The problem is, everyone in Vientiane has seen my power-point already so I’ll have to make something up again. I’ve already started memorizing jokes and rehearsing that spontaneous self-consciousness that endears me to strangers. If only they knew how miserable I am deep inside.

There, that’s increased this week’s internet hits a thousand fold. Simple little word with great selling power. Just the faintest scent of it has customers queued up outside the fence wagging their tails in hope that they’ll have a glimpse of the hind end of a dirty idea. The worldwide addiction to a concept. Would ‘Sex and the City’ be the hit it is if it had been called “Middleaged Women Complaining about Stuff’? I don’t think so. Would we have tolerated the Sex Pistols if they’d been named Johnny and the Melodeers? Nope.  Sex, without any question, sells. Click it on Google. You automatically get five-hundred and twenty-five million hits. That’s three-hundred and ninety million more than ‘chocolate’ and five-hundred and twenty-four point six million more than ‘having a cold shower’. (Those of you at the back shouting, “Get a life, Cotterill” can sit back down and keep quiet. There’s a point. Wait… what was it again?

Oh, right. The point is that I’m thinking of putting the word SEX in the title of my next book. I have neither a story nor the rest of the title in mind just yet but I know that we’ll do really well if there’s a hint of the naughties hidden within its pages. Perhaps something like, “Sex Au Plaines des Jarres” or “Sex Below the Golden Triangle”. Either will elevate me onto some bestseller list somewhere because the world is obsessed with sex. Really. You’re all sex mad, either mad for it or mad against it. If John Terry had merely blasted a bloke in a pub with a sawn off shotgun the Football Association would have shaken its head and said, “Huh, that Terry, what a character, eh?” But he did something much worse. He had sex with the ex-girlfriend of his ex-teammate whilst married to someone else. I have to point out that the young woman in question was a very voluptuous lingerie model-type who had been known to frolic from paddock to paddock. England is up in arms. The FA (so named for obvious reasons) has decided that John boy may no longer captain his country in this year’s World Cup finals in South Africa. Do you know why that is? It’s because every man on the committee would loved to have spent just half an hour with the curvaceous beauty discussing off-side tactics and dead ball situations. They’re men. It’s the only thing on their minds. They all felt aggrieved that John boy had been found out because they were living their sex lives vicariously through him.

Tiger’s doing time in a sex addiction clinic. All his major sponsors have deserted him. Some members of parliament in Thailand have suggested he be stripped of his honorary citizenship. Why? Because he had sex with not one blond beauty, but a whole bevy of them, sometimes in tag teams, a dream fantasy that those Thai politicians have woken up sweating from in the middle of the night since their earliest youths.

Old Bill got himself a blowjob in the Oval Office. The male Republicans nudged each other and said, “Good on you, Bill” then attempted to impeach the poor bugger. You see the irony here? You can bomb the bejumpers out of Arabs and inflict no end of hardship on third world countries, but don’t you even think about engaging in the sexual act. The world’s so hung up about sex it’s failed to see it as the minor buzz that it is. It’s all in the packaging. Most of the people in the world secretly think they’re the only one on the planet who doesn’t have one endless orgasm after another. They believe those porn stars are actually enjoying twenty minutes of mechanical pumping and grinding and going “Oh yeah”. They’re actors. It’s horizontal jogging. The actual pleasure is over in seconds. You can all relax. It’s a minor stimulant right up there with a good bowel evacuation after a heavy meal or a hot bath on a cold day. In fact, the thought of it is far more intoxicating than the thing itself. Nobody’s realized that it’s the kissing and the cuddling and the feeling of being close to another person that’s the real intoxicant yet we’ve come to dismiss that as foreplay. We’re so busy unwrapping the gift that we throw away the gold leaf paper it’s shrouded in. The world remains cramped in the pain of its obsession, whether it be the obsessive dream of having it or the obsessive compulsion for condemning others for having it.

So, by putting the word SEX in my title I hope to plug in (tee hee) to the universal quest for that unfindable seam of pleasure. If people out there are dumb enough to flip out over a three-letter word, I’m certainly going to take advantage of them.

Inspired by the fluffy teen photo the Moore bloke posted on his blob last week, I decided to cast my mind back to a time when innocence and ignorance were my companions and I still had dreams of being a train driver (actually I still have that dream on occasions but now people throw themselves in front of the train.) .

It’s hard to believe it now, given the swarthy Amazon I’ve become, but that scrawny, effete little twerp in the photo (Front row left, grinning like a ballerina on heroin.) is me. Yes, it came as a shock to me too when it arrived by email last year. We have images of ourselves as children and, in my mind, I was a tough hombre in primary school. I sat in the back row with Davo and Swanny and flicked ink balls at Jane Sullivan. I never answered any questions unless I was being sarcastic and I spent as much time in detention as I did in class. I was the football, athletics and cricket champion and I broke every bone in my body before I was eleven. At least that’s how I remembered myself.

Through one of those naff sites that allow you to contact schoolmates you would have maintained contact with if you’d been at all fond of in the first place, I saw the name of Mr. Chandler, my grade five and six teacher. By my calculations he was either 223 years old or emailing from the grave. Mr. Chandler had been my hero. He was a rugby player and got his photo in the Wimbledon Borough News from time to time. It was probably due to Mr. Chandler that I gave up my hopes of driving trains and set my sights on being a teacher and playing rugby for England.

I wrote to Mr. C and, to my delight, he wrote back. He wasn’t dead. He’d migrated to Australia, as had I, and he’d taught for many years and retired to gardening, as had I. He married a pretty wife, as did I, and had two grown up children, as…as far as I know…had I not. But, very much unlike me, he had an incredible memory. Not only did he recall the names of every kid in his class, he could tell you most of the things we did and said during his first two years as a teacher. Odd then that he should remember me so poorly.

According to Mr. C, I was. “…very easy to teach, one of the brightest boys in the class with a great sense of humour, any father would be proud to have you as a son.” Excuse me, I always get a lump in my throat when I read that line. I sent it to my dad and he said, “Yeah, right. He didn’t have to live with you.” Mr. C sent me photos of the sports teams. Shock there too. I was always the one fully dressed off to one side. Something about me being ‘the scorer’, as in ‘the one who hangs the metal numbers on the score board.’ I did make the swimming team but I think that’s because we lived beside the swimming baths and I spent much of my childhood up to my chin in chlorine which explains how I retained my youthful appearance.

But, looking at the photo and learning that I wasn’t at all a tough guy, explains why I was such a target for dirty-old-men. On my paper round of a morning I was approached by a steady stream of flashers and candy-offerers and lip-lickers. I was offered so much money to go into the woods that I could have built up a sizeable bank account before I hit high school. It’s a wonder I wasn’t bundled into a van and whisked away to have my forever young skeleton discovered, thirty years later, in the soundproof cellar of a retired Catholic priest. I was paedophile fodder: a soft-skinned, talks-to-anyone, pretty ten year old wimp.

I did eventually play rugby and break every bone in my body as I’d dreamed. I became a physical education teacher and started to put on some bulk and grew a beard and the perverts left me alone. It wasn’t till thirty years later that I went after them, probably hoping to fulfill all those subliminal Death Wish revenge fantasies that had lain simmering in my inner id. But after four years of child protection I hadn’t made much of a dent in the paedo-population and I didn’t feel much better at all. There was a way, however. I wrote my first book, “The Night Bastard”. And you wouldn’t believe how many perverts I abused in that book. It was a too-long, depressing door stop of a novel and, perhaps wisely, nobody bought it, but I tell you, I’ve felt so much better since I got it all out of my system. In my next book there’s a chapter called, “The Therapeutic Effects of Dying Horribly”. But the therapeutic effects of killing people are even more energizing. If there’s someone you hate, don’t go to the trouble of draping a room in splash proof plastic and wrapping their naked bodies in shrink wrap, and disposing of the parts in the bay. Do what you like to them in a book. It’s much more satisfying.