Orange

A little piece I wrote when I was about eleven years old. Many have suggested it was the zenith of my creativity...

I'm an orange, as orange as can be,
You can squeeze me after dinner, then drink me during tea.
I'm a fruit, a drink, a colour as well,
I seem to be so popular; I really go down well.
When I'm a fruit, you eat me slice by slice,
I'm succulent and juicy; you'll find me quite nice.
When I'm a colour, I'm dazzling and bright,
I come in different shades; dark, medium and light.
When I'm a drink, I'm poured into a glass,
But if you don't drink me, I'm sure to turn to gas.
Tennis players gulp me, after they've scored deuce,
Now I really must stop writing as I'm running low on juice.

The Art of Embarrassment

Whenever you find yourself in a situation so uncomfortable, so cringe-inducing, so downright awkward and embarrassing that the skin on your face has soared to obscene temperatures and all but melted completely off, there isn't much you can do other than laugh about it afterwards. The truth of the matter is, no-one enjoys experiencing those blush-inducing moments, and yet - it has to be said - a certain solace can be found when telling the tale afterwards. I'd go as far as saying that recounting our ordeals to others once they've occurred makes up for them happening in the first place, and by turn, actually worth enduring.

We've all done things so stupendously stupid that we wish the Earth would swallow us whole and excrete us out the other side; we've done them in the past, and we'll do them again in the future. Some of us are even doing them in the present - I guarantee it. We've all sent messages of a sensitive nature to the wrong person by mistake. We've all stumbled in the street and made it look as though we did it on purpose. We've all wandered into the incorrect toilet - though not all of us chose to wander back out again. We've all accidentally spat food into the face of an acquaintance mid-conversation, broke wind at an inappropriate time and failed to remember someone's name we've worked with for seventeen years. And we've all, as school-children, called our teacher ‘mum’; something that's all the more embarrassing when the teacher is a bloke.

As it goes, one of the earliest memories I can muster up in which my cheeks were enflamed with abashment was during a lesson at primary school. The teacher was drawing up some maths problems on the blackboard - as I recall, she was attempting to show us how a simple sum could be phrased as a mathematical 'story', along the lines of 'if there are fifteen pupils and three school buses...' etc. I wasn't paying any attention whatsoever, so when the teacher asked me to give an example of a story, my response was 'Peter Pan'. A couple of giggles rippled across the class at first, then a few more, until the entire room had erupted with laughter. There's a good chance I'd have gotten away with it being an offhand remark - a joke at the teacher's expense - if only the blood vessels in my face hadn't betrayed me.

In more recent memory, one particular incident always springs to mind when I feel the need to delve into my internal treasure-trove of shame. It was Remembrance Day, and I was at work, at my desk, in a large, open plan office. Earlier that morning, an e-mail was circulated to inform us all that at 11am we would be observing the two minutes silence. I read the e-mail, digested the information, then promptly forgot all about it. When 11 o'clock came around the entire compliment of workers stopped what they were doing and lowered their heads in a respectful hush. Everyone, of course, apart from me...

Please, hear me out. In my defence, the office was more often than not somewhat on the quiet side anyway; people were always comparing it to a library. And as I'd completely lost track of time, it's not beyond the realms of compassionate understanding as to why, as everyone entered the bubble of silent contemplation, that I was left on the outside, inhabiting my own personal sphere of complete and utter ignorance.

Looking back, if I'd continued to work at my desk for the subsequent couple of minutes, I daresay anyone would've noticed. As it was, I needed to print something as a matter of some urgency. I hit the print button, raised myself purposefully up from my chair and headed off across the office, totally oblivious to the numerous pairs of eyes stalking me as I marched off down the central walkway.

As I neared the printers, I spotted the managing director of the company seated at a large meeting table with two guests. The three of them stared at me, open-mouthed, as I continued walking in their direction. One of them caught my eye, and I shot them a friendly nod before turning into the print room, thinking how unfriendly they were for not at least giving me a small smile in return.

Waiting for me inside the tray was a warm, freshly printed document. When I mentioned before how important this particular document was, I may have been exaggerating slightly; it was the lunch menu for the local deli. I grabbed it, made a 180, and stepped back out into the office. By this stage any normal, reasonably cognisant person would have surely noticed something was amiss. Not me. Literally everyone in the office was either staring at me, or shifting in their seats uncomfortably, trying to stare at anything but me. And yet I continued, unperturbed and unaware.

I was about halfway back across the room when I spotted a friend on the edge of my field of vision. As I adjusted my course and made my way nearer, I found the look on his face to be a confounding mixture of horror and bemusement. And then it happened. I placed the menu down in front of him, clapped my hands together loudly and boomed the immortal words at the top of my voice: "So! Sandwiches?"

Well, that was too much for him. The laugh he was stifling began to make it's way past his teeth and out of his mouth; the air rushed out in fits and starts. I stared back into his pleading eyes, extremely puzzled by this point. Suddenly, the woman seated at the next desk made a loud shushing noise. I looked up to see her angrily pressing her finger to her mouth, gesticulating that I be quiet. The penny finally, finally dropped. In that one nauseating instant I realised exactly what was going on.

The familiar paralysing sense of dread flooded my body; pinpricks of sweat burst forth from every pore on my face. An immense desire to travel back in time and strangle myself at birth overcame me as I looked around the room to see everyone glaring in my direction. Far too ashamed to remain where I was, I slunk past a tirade of disapproving shaking heads and crept slowly back to my seat. The remaining thirty seconds or so of the two minute's silence passed by all too quickly.

In each of the cases I've outlined above, I had no-one to blame but myself, and therein lies the innocent beauty of it all. There is a poetry to be found in the unpredictability of embarrassment - it has to be unpredictable otherwise we'd learn from it and never put ourselves through it again. You can't force it of course - I have no time for people who actively enjoy embarrassing people on purpose; those who take pleasure in seeing people squirm, who actively make them feel uncomfortable. There's no real joy to be had in hearing someone tell you how they humiliated someone else.

And I'm sure a much more benevolent world it would be if everyone was so socially well-adjusted they constantly and consistently compensated for any unintended faux-pas and made each other feel totally at ease at all times. There'd be no more stomach-churning blunders, no more flustered flushes and no more head-slapping gaffes. But then, in this idyllic world there'd be no embarrassing stories to share afterwards either, and where would the fun be in that?

Making the World a Drier Place

When I was about eighteen years of age, a most peculiar change occurred within my body. I’m not talking about puberty belatedly kicking in or anything - although, in many ways, that could have proved less humiliating than this. The more I think about it, I wouldn’t rule out the cause being, in some way, hormonal. It certainly wasn't hereditary, so it was quite likely to be triggered by an internal imbalance of some kind, or perhaps an environmental stimulus. But I digress.

One seemingly normal day, quite without warning, I began to sweat excessively (and, may I add, exclusively) from my arm-pits. To paint a picture for you, try to recall the Lynx advert from a few years ago, the one with the bloke suffering from water gushing out from underneath his arms as if each were connected to a fireman’s hose… well, it was rather a lot like that.

It was as if someone had happened across two high-pressure valves that were inextricably linked to my body – one to each armpit – and on this day they'd finally decided to undo them. I, on the other hand, was completely in the dark when it came to these other-worldly hydrants, and I didn’t have the foggiest how I was going to turn the water supply off again.

If I am to make only one thing clear it must be this: I am, and always have been, a hygienic person. Just as I do now, at this point in my life I showered daily, washed myself thoroughly, and maintained at all times a pleasing, if not particularly fragrant, bodily aroma. I scrubbed, soaped and sanitized every inch of the fleshy wells underneath each arm, without question removing any pesky bacterium that dared to call either of my pits its home. I dried myself suitably and carefully, sprayed on the correct amount of anti-perspirant deodorant, and wore freshly laundered clothes at all times.

So although I was sweating profusely, I never succumbed to the advanced perils of body odour by adhering to the regime described above. As I searched desperately for a solution to my newly developed dampness, I could at least avoid developing any unpleasant whiffs by changing my (admittedly stained) t-shirts regularly, and deny the aforementioned organisms the chance to swarm and multiply in the jungles of my underarms.

But there was no escaping it - I had a problem. I couldn't possibly afford the amount of new t-shirts I'd continue to require, so instead I turned to science to help me out. I figured if it was possible to put a man on the moon, then a cure for my unwanted moistness should be a snap. And yet, after making my way through a variety of 'special' deodorants, I began to give up hope. Not one of them made an impact on my issue; not one of them offered me a light at the end of my dark and sticky tunnel. Not one, that is, until I happened upon a concoction called aluminium chloride hexahydrate; a miracle potion known commercially as... Driclor.

To say this particular product changed my life is not an overstatement. I assure you I'm not being paid hard cash by the manufacturers to tell you this, but nonetheless I can happily and honestly say I endorse the fruit of their labours wholeheartedly. You'll pay around five or six pounds for what you may think to be a disproportionately small container of the stuff, but this is not half as bad as it seems when you realise you don't have to use it all the time.

For all intents and purposes, it operates exactly like a normal roll-on deodorant, but as the instructions point out you must apply it just before bed and wash it off the following morning. What the instructions fail to point out is that most people will suffer from an unpleasant burning sensation during the night, accompanied by a terrible need to scratch the irritated skin. This is usually a small hurdle to be overcome, and if you cannot make it through that first night then it shouldn't be anything a damp flannel can't fix. And yet, I suppose, if your skin does not react favourably each time you use it, then perhaps you are one of the unlucky ones, condemned to an eternity of embarrassment and shame.

For the vast majority, however, any faith tentatively placed in Driclor will not go unrewarded. As the label says, it "combats excessive perspiration", and "last for weeks, not hours" - this sacred text should be taken as gospel. It's such a small change to make to your normal routine; you simply carry on using your normal deodorant as usual, and gradually decrease the applications of Driclor. When you start to notice the results (unstained clothing; skin dry to the touch; lack of derision, giggling and outright screaming from those around you), you will feel truly blessed.

As you can imagine, my eighteen-year-old self was overjoyed with all this; it really was the answer to my prayers. It's a real testament to the product that even now, years later, I still continue to use it, and I've found that these days I only have to apply it once every two months or so. Maybe by blocking off my sweat glands it's slowly but surely clogging up my entire insides, until one day my head explodes in a spectacular shower of suppressed secretions, but until that day I'll blissfully reap the benefits.

Other than admiring the now-familiar white container on my nightstand and adhering to those bi-monthly applications, I spend the rest of my time spreading the good word; I seek out fellow sufferers of hyperhidrosis and convert them to the ways of Driclor. Many people have mocked me for worshipping a deodorant in such a manner and decry my preaching, but they are far outnumbered by the gratified souls that heeded my advice. If the day ever dawns when they stop producing it, then myself and the hoards of other loyal followers will truly be up sweat creek without a paddle. I can picture it now; it'd be like the world's worst impromptu wet t-shirt contest.

Incidentally, on a slightly related note, at around the age I first discovered Driclor I once tried washing without any products - such as soap, shower gel and shampoo - for about a month, in an attempt to attract girls. I’d heard it'd worked for some bloke out there, the theory being that cosmetic products mask our true human scent. This way, the chemicals of sexual attraction could be free to diffuse through the air rather than be muted by the artificial smells we so readily douse ourselves in. It didn’t work.

An Ode To My Uvula

A widely unwelcome piece of poetry that has no business in existing, and yet – perhaps ironically – is based entirely on facts and truths.

You hang there in your slimy cave
Like a slippery pink stalactite
Sometimes your soft tissues
Inflate and swell and block my throat
Meaning I can’t drink
Or eat
Or breathe

I wish you would stop doing it
Aren’t you happy
Living in my mouth?
You pesky little ceiling grape.