against what happened next may be staggeringly high, but they could happen again. So be warned.
As I gazed into the reassuring and life-affirming distance, my gentle reflections were interrupted with a breathtaking rudeness.
‘AAAAAH!’ I screamed.
Suddenly there was an excruciating pain in the end of my penis. I looked down to see a wasp had settled on the end of my right-honourable member, and off it now flew, no doubt with the wasp equivalent of a smug grin on its face.
‘JESUS CHRIST ALMIGHTY!’ I cried out. ‘THE BUGGER HAS STUNG ME!’
I panicked. I turned and charged back towards the house, wincing with pain and belting out expletives as I went. Any neighbours gardening within a square-mile radius would have stopped and wondered, ‘Now what was that noise, and what could have caused it?’ They wouldn’t have guessed the terrible truth. Hearing these disturbing sounds, Fran appeared from the kitchen.
‘What is it?’
‘A WASP HAS STUNG THE END OF MY KNOB!’
I didn’t wait for a response, feeling fairly sure that Fran wouldn’t have been able to find the right words to provide adequate comfort, and I dashed passed her and up the stairs.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’M GOING TO RUN A BATH! AAAH!’
Everything I said and did for the next few minutes was accompanied by an ‘AAAH!’ as my penis throbbed in response to the spiteful wasp’s venom. Pain, unwanted and excruciating pain, was accompanied by an equally unwelcome cohort – fear. As the bath filled, my mind raced with all the hideous possibilities that might result from this incident. Would I ever be able to pee again without it hurting? Would erections be heady things of the past? Would my knob simply fall off? Then there was the swelling. I could virtually see this happening before my own eyes as I sat, rigid, wincing, fear-stricken, in the tepid bath water. Erotic thoughts or feelings of desire couldn’t have been further from my mind, and yet my penis was swelling. I had a swelling penis for all the wrong reasons. Surely the worst kind of swelling penis.
Fran popped her head into the bathroom.
‘How is it?’ she asked, timidly.
‘Look,’ I said, pointing to it, ‘it’s swelling up.’
‘Oh dear. Should we go to casualty?’
‘Not yet. Let’s see what happens. Maybe research it online and see if there’s anything I should be doing.’
‘OK.’
The odd thing is that I couldn’t quite disconnect the comic side of my brain. Bizarrely, it occurred to me that a trip to casualty would give me a chance to weave an old joke into a natural situation.
TONY: ‘I’ve been stung by a wasp, have you got anything for it?’
DOCTOR: ‘Whereabouts is it?’
TONY: ‘I don’t know, it could be miles away by now.’
Not worth a twenty-minute drive and a two-hour wait staring at people who had fallen off things.
Fifteen minutes later, I was sitting in the kitchen, greatly relieved that the pain was now easing off. Fran’s internet search had revealed little, other than the fact that some ancient cultures had used wasp stings for penis enlargement. Surely a foolish quick fix? It had certainly worked for me, but it hardly encouraged amorous thoughts. It was an excellent way of creating a big, pointless penis at short notice, so I guess I could take solace in that useful information gained.
It wasn’t until several days later that the soreness and last vestiges of the swelling disappeared completely. My body was back to normal. Not a temple maybe, but akin to a small church, at least in so far as it had a fully functioning organ.
Amen to that.
4
Harnessing Skills
One morning, when I popped round to Ken’s to ask for his help with something, I eased into the question slowly and began by telling him about my problems with the slugs.
‘Our son Andrew entered a snail in a snail race once,’ he said, going off on a rather surprising tangent, ‘and he had the idea of removing its shell to lighten its
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