Poo-ology

Its funny how life seems to run in themes.  A certain thing happens or is spoken about in your own world and suddenly you see it everywhere and everyone is talking about it or doing it.  For example, at times your life is governed by illnesses, your own or others’.  Babies seem to go in and out of fashion.  Everybody is fine for ages, then one woman goes down and suddenly you see huge bellies everywhere you look.  Recently the theme was breakdowns, as in mechanical ones not nervous ones thank goodness.  First our washing machine acted up, then the under-floor heating decided to act up and then the tap in our bathroom started to drip ominously.  At the same time my daughter’s car broke down leaving her stranded in West Cork and then her kitchen roof started to leak.  These events were swiftly followed by a message from my dear friend Jane who was looking for someone to fix her fridge and also the electrics in her spare room. You see not just my own breakdowns.

Just in the past couple of days I have been thinking about Poo, but not just me it would appear, this week’s zeitgeist is spreading itself far and wide.  Only last night at a charming little Christmas get-together I went to I found myself talking about all sorts of things scatalogical.  Standing casually with a glass of wine in one hand and a canapé in the other, the lovely Natasha told me a story about her three-year-old son, proudly presenting her with his little poo on a stick after going au natural somewhere in the garden shrubbery.  How we laughed as she delicately pulled the grape smothered in piped cheese off its little cocktail stick with her teeth.  I will protect her honour by not mentioning her name.  Oh I just did!  Silly me.  Another guest, whose name I did not catch (lucky her), was telling me about the time that somebody actually posted a bag of dog poo into her letter-box.  People do the darndest things.  A bit later on a little Freudian slip had me mention in passing that my father had defecated from Russia just after the Second World War – yes of course I meant to say defected, but that’s just how these themes are, they infect you.

One evening, while I was channel-hopping, I happened on a travel a show, this one on Japan.  One of the many Japanese idiosyncrasies being talked about was a toilet-themed restaurant where you could order an ice-cream, or indeed all sorts of foods, in the shape and colour of a gigantic poo.  During your visit you sat on a chair made out of a toilet with a poo-shaped cushion and upon leaving you could buy a little poo keyring or plush poo teddy.  Just the sort of thing one would like to snuggle in bed.

Then this morning on our walk, my own personal little poo fetishist, Kerry, managed to find the most unmentionable stuff.  I don’t actually know if it was poo, but if it was I have no idea from what animal it issued, a fox, racoon, skunk, cat, weasel!  No idea, except it was absolutely vile.  I only noticed it by its smell as we were walking into the house at which point the stench rose and assailed my sensitive nostrils.  As I went to investigate I managed to put my hand into it.  I was not a happy camper.  It was up to the bathroom immediately and Kerry got a bath.  Then I sniffed Candy and realised that she must have brushed off her sister so she got bathed too.  I was going to leave Looki out of it as I had given him the once over with my nose and he just smelled like an old leather handbag, which is his normal smell, but then I thought his ears and beard looked a bit grubby so decided to make it a hat trick.  I now have three lovely smelling, clean doggies and a soaking wet bathroom.

For those of a sensitive nature I would suggest that you look away now and do not continue reading.  For the rest I would like to talk about my own and my dogs’ interest in all things fecal…

I have always had a fascination with my own body and the things that go into it and come out of it.  This is of course not unique to me.  All humans are really quite fascinated by these things, though usually secretly, and I was amused to learn, while potty training my children (a long time ago I might add), about some of the deeper feelings children, and by extension all of us, feel about our bodily functions.  If I remember correctly it was Freud who spoke about the possessiveness we feel about our poos.  A child will take enormous pride in a rather large performance on the potty and then might express sheer horror as he sees his creation being flushed down the loo.  If you have a child who cries when you flush you should be rather more careful and not do the flushing until the child has left the bathroom and forgotten about his ‘work of art.’  I think we feel the same as adults, though manners and decorum dictate that we never speak about it.  However, I am certain that we are all secretly proud of a large, firm yet friable poo that falls away from the bottom in one movement from sit to wipe.  Luckily we learn to let go as we get older, otherwise our lavatories would get rather full.

When we were children my father’s work took him and us to Munich, Germany.  Culturally it was a big eye-opener for four rather sheltered, catholic school children.  Coming from early 1970’s Britain we were amazed that nudity was allowed so openly on the television and that was just the adverts for underarm deodorant or shampoo.  But it was the German toilets that we found most amusing as they were equipped with a viewing-platform.  If you are not familiar with these, try to imagine that instead of the plain plunge pool we are so familiar with, there is a step from the back of the porcelain, inside the bowl of course, which leaves the familiar plunge to the front of the WC.  When you poo your movement falls onto this plateau first and sits there in full sight until you flush.  At first we thought this was terrible and very vulgar, but as time wore on we got used to it, as in fact it gave us the opportunity to examine our own offering every morning and pass a thought or even comment on the state of our intestinal workings.  I miss that opportunity now as toilets everywhere else are all of the deep plunge variety where your poo disappears into a pool of water before you have a chance to examine it.  Even while visiting my son and his fiancée in Berlin a couple of years ago I was disappointed to find the ‘normal’ variety of toilet.  Perhaps they have all been replaced or were only common in the south of Germany.  Perhaps I should Google it.

Now I do understand that these things are not really discussed openly when one becomes an adult, but children and dogs still possess that open interest, fascination and disgust and often show it.

In the very youngest class that I teach I have children who love saying the word bottom.  No matter how many times they repeat the word it sends them and all those around them into paroxysms of laughter.  I have to pretend to be stern, but it is really quite harmless behaviour and the Spanish word ‘culo’ has a rather nice ring to it, as does our own English word ‘bottom’.  After all, who can ever forget Bottom the weaver from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and we laughed at his name as much as his silliness and his donkey head.

Farting too (or even just the sound of a fart, blown by the mouth and known as a raspberry) will also serve to send all children old and young into gales of laughter.  The smell that accompanies the bottom variety is not so welcomed though and people will stop laughing then, pinch their noses and point their grubby little fingers at the dealer of the fart.

Our morning dog-walk has its own poo ritual.  First I get the dogs saddled up and they all rush to the front door.  I then put on my jacket and put my little bag over my shoulder.  I open it and count the poo bags within. One, two, three…We will need a couple more.  I take two new bags from the stock and tease them open, then I scrunch them down to go in with the others.  I read a very wise tip from somebody on the Internet about this very thing.  Dogs have a terrible habit of deciding to go poo right in the wrong place; on a dangerous corner or slap bang in the middle of the road.  To keep herding your little pack and to enable a rapid poop-scoop it is much easier if your bag has been pre-opened, otherwise you find yourself in a terrible predicament, in my own case not only fumbling with one hand to open a fiddly new bag but also trying to hold on tight to three quite strong dogs who are trying to take off in different directions.

Three little dogs exhausted after doing so much poo.

Unless I have to do the pickup in a rush I like to take this time to examine what has come out of my dogs.  Each of my three have different bowel habits and their movements have a distinctly different composition.  I pretty much know what to expect from each.  Looki is usually the first to offload. He suddenly goes from a cocked leg to a hunch and quickly pops out the first poo.  It will be quite large, darkish and dry at the start, becoming more moist towards the tail end of it.  It is marvellously easy to pick up and normally leaves no mark on the pavement.  I carefully scan it for any odd foreign bodies that he might have ingested (plastics, string and such) and for any sign of worms, of which he did have a small infestation during the summer.  Tapeworm I think.  You might have gathered that I love Googling things like that on the Internet.  I am becoming a pretty good diagnostician.  In fact, recently I alerted a fellow dog walker to the fact that he may have been bitten by a Lyme’s disease infected tick.  He was showing me the ring-shaped mark on his calf, as one does, and I suggested he should consult a doctor as I suspected that was what it was.  Lo and behold, the next time our paths crossed he had been to the pharmacist who had said the very same thing and had prescribed him a 21 day course of antibiotics.  Serious stuff.

The next one to drop is usually Kerry.  Her movement is much thinner, moister and lighter in colour than Looki’s.  His comes out in short, round logs while hers are more of a folded, flattened worm.  Hers are more difficult to scoop up as they tend to cling to the pavement, but luckily she doesn’t usually drop until we get to the scrubby part of our walk, which is pretty much a dog-toilet.  Other times she holds it until we get to the park where it is also easy enough to pick it up off the sand.

Candy very rarely poos while we are on our walk.  She prefers the privacy of our own garden, but on the occasions she does, hers, like Looki’s is firm, quite dark and dryish and an easy pick-up too. 

Candy prefers a bit of privacy.

Unfortunately Looki does not usually stop at one poo.  Of the three of them he is the most prolific, on our walks that is.  (The amount of poo that I have to pick up in the garden every day for three small dogs is phenomenal!)  His second poo will be noticeably softer though and harder to scoop and woe betide you if he goes a third time, as that is sometimes quite runny, or when he has a tummy upset it is pure liquid, which is impossible to pick up so then I always hope he goes in the grass somewhere.  If he does it on a pavement I have to fish for a tissue and try my best to get some of it up or at least make the effort.  I don’t like to leave a mess.

Looki is also the dog who likes to back into a bush for a crap.  This is a bit of a pain really as it sometimes means teasing the nuggets out of the leaves and searching for them in the shade of the bush.  They can be hard to find, especially on a dull winter’s day or when you have a hangover.

Of course, like most good dogs we also have moments of coprophagia, which means the eating of excrement, one’s own or that of others found on the road.  This is a behaviour that I strictly discourage as it is plain disgusting!  I do have my limits, though as you can tell my boundaries spread a bit wider than most people’s.

I have no problem discussing my own or others’ bodily functions, though to spare you I will not go into the details of my own self-diagnosed IBS and the myriad variety of my stool movements for you here.  I think that the dogs have offered enough entertainment of their own for one blog.  But I have said it and others have noted it:  in another life I think I would have made an excellent poo-ologist, or, as I have learned now from my prolific Googling, a coprologist.

I think we should have an International Poo Day.