Hermaphrodite Healthcare

As we often do, last night I received a call from dear old nana calling on behalf of her cherished loin-fruit, who in turn is calling on behalf of the darling cherubim of a grandson. I forget the name, but as these calls are often near-identical, I would place good money that he is either a Cain/Kane, Kaden/Zaden, a Tyler or a Taylor. I also once had a Christofa. No lie. Of course, the reason for the gran intermediary is, as is always the case, that mum is cruelly sundered from our welcoming arms by a pay as you go mobile, our local call-rate and the amount left of this month's giro. So it goes.

So, nana tells me in the vaguest of terms of the child's general illness: his fever, a bit of a headache, all in the last day or so (sadly, in our society of instantaneous wish-fulfillment and bloated sense of entitlement, we refuse to admit that anything so hideous as a high temperature might afflict our children for so much as a night without the doctor racing out to cure it for us as Britain's Got Talent drones in the background), that he's 'not right well', and 'like an oven'. Since her daughter and grandchild are, however, on yonder side of Bradford I decide just to ring her myself and get the hopefully more accurate down-low. So I take mum's phone number, her name, and, as per protocol, tell her to alert mum to the call before I get in touch with her.

I try the mobile number and... it's a dud. I try again - no dice. Thus I call dear old Nana back to clarify the number, but, of course, it's engaged. I try again five minutes later... still engaged. Obviously someone must've mentioned this week's Coronation Street in passing. So, as an adjunct to merely sitting there cupping my balls in contemplation, I search our previous records for any record pertaining to the child (of whom I have only a name, a vague location and an age but no specific DOB) and find a record that might, might just be the one. So I opens it up, and it's the wrong one. I can tell straight away - wrong side of the city, wrong age. But, something catches my eye in the previous call reason. And here I stand and tentatively clear my throat in anticipation as I read it:

'swollen penis, painful pussy 2 days'.

Now, I will admit that my colleagues' spelling is about on par with an adolescent gibbon at the best of times. But the surety of it, the lack of any kind of punctuation between 'painful' and 'pussy', well... it just makes me proud that we're here for those moments when even hermaphrodites lose their good judgement and don't use a condom with themselves.

This was possibly the most needlessly complex penis gag I've ever told.

Tim Westwood

'Hence it is, that the children of bishops carry about with them an austere and repulsive air, indicative of claims not generally acknowledged, a sort of noli me tangere manner, nervously apprehensive of too familiar approach, and shrinking with the sensitiveness of a gouty man.' Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821).

FC-KR Derby

As something of an expatriate Hull KR fan (having emigrated from family territory in East Hull to, well, more of the Westward fringes) I'm obviously seething from the recent loss to the monochromatic bastards. Tight one mind you, and we're still leading in terms of total derbys won, but it's always a sore blow. As I was just going downstairs to fetch a cup of tea though, it occurred to me how absurd the fanatic, die-hard loyalty that surrounds clubs can be. While the hardened Rovers fans scream for the will of the Robin-God himself to be unleashed on t'other bastards, the righteous fury is actually coolly delivered by what looks more like a touring Australasian bodybuilding group.

Although it's something I have little to no interest in, football is much the same, if not worse. Quite simply, why cheer for your city out there when nobody on the pitch is actually from the bloody place? Yet the bloody-minded fanaticism of most suggests that most fans haven't factored-in that their team is essentially just a superfluous badge for a succession of preening dicks in hairbands. Since I rarely take note of football, every time I look it seems a uniquely Heraclitean experience: as he tells us that you can never step into the same river twice, I can never seem to look at the same bloody club twice either. Actually, Roberto Bolano prefaces his Nazi Literature of the Americas with a cute refutation of this by Augusto Monterroso: 'If the flow is slow enough and you have a good bicycle, or a horse, it is possible to bathe twice (or even three times, should your personal hygiene so require) in the same river.' So, I'm pretty much guessing that this is how Talksport phoners-in still manage to stay bothered then.