“And so then they slid the camera up there…”

“And so then they slid the camera up there…”

I closed my notebook and clicked my pen back inside itself. I wasn’t going to be taking any notes in this meeting.

“It was about the size of a pen…”

I placed my pen quietly down on the table and looked at the clock. I had a deadline to meet in three hours and I was listening to a middle aged man describe having a camera pushed up his penis.

He wasn’t even being funny about it. I mean, there’s loads of scope to be funny with hospital stories, isn’t there? Especially if they involve genitalia. If you’re really struggling, go for the classic – “He asked me to drop my trousers. Then, the doctor walked in!” IT WAS THE CLEANER.THE CLEANER ASKED HIM TO DROP HIS TROUSERS. The joke has been made, we’ve all a polite little laugh and now we can get on with talking about literally anything else that has ever happened in the world at all.

So, as I listened to the Cystoscopy Chronicles and practiced my “I’m not thinking about your penis being kebab-ed by a camera” face, I began to think about what would happen if the situation were reversed – if I was to open a meeting with an over-rehearsed anecdote about an intimate medical procedure.

“Before we get into things, I want to talk about something that happened to me last week. Stick with me, it’s relevant, I promise.  So, I was having my smear test, right…”

Or

“Right, I just want to kick off this meeting with something that I think is really going to put things in perspective and have a huge impact on the results of this discussion – my period is, like, super heavy right now. I mean, really, I’m scared to move…”

I can’t be one hundred percent certain, but I’m definitely in the eighties when I say that someone, most likely the guy with penis problems, would have repeatedly spritzed me with water and put me outside, before vomiting down his shirt.

I think it’s widely acknowledged that men’s bodies have to be funny and women’s bodies have to be sexy. If it’s not then please, let’s all acknowledge it now so that it becomes, er, wide.

Women’s bodies have to be sexy - they cannot be gross. I mean, obviously, they can and often are, take it from someone who has one, but that grossness is supposed to be contained and never spoken of, let alone used as an opener to an inconveniently timed meeting. Weird blue alien blood is used in tampon adverts, because red liquid would make people want to press their thumbs into their own eye sockets, but I’m having to listen to a guy tell me about the stretching feeling he felt when a camera got pushed into the end of his dick? At work? I have to say ‘smear test’ on an in-breath, or with a comically exaggerated mime, when discussing my nerves with a girlfriend in a coffee shop, so as not to put someone off their poorly filled panini, but graphic descriptions of the end of this guy’s knob is judged as an appropriate…anything? If my body is anything other than small and quiet and contained then it’s going to make everyone uncomfortable. Much more uncomfortable than whatever was happening in this meeting.

Now, I’m not getting all down on the fellas, here. It must be hard having to accept that your body is, usually, nothing more than a comedic prop. I’m sure it’s hard when you want to be all sexy and stuff, and is even harder when you’re worried that something is wrong with it, something that could actually kill you dead. 

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been privy to numerous discussions in which men have recounted somewhat personal medical procedures, one of which was my own grandfather. Prostate examinations, vasectomies, I’ve heard it all (two, I’ve heard about those two things) and the man telling them always peppers the story with unimaginative, thin jokes. I don’t blame them for trying to be funny, I mean, if you can’t laugh at a stranger putting two of his fingers up your bum then when can you? I also don’t blame them for failing to be funny, I mean, if you can’t feel a little off your game when you’re going through invasive tests to see whether there is a tumour is in your body then when can you?

So, in short, it’s a bit shit for all of us. We’re all gross and we can all be nervous about uncomfortable medical procedures. And, in the time it took me to think about all of this and come up with pretty much no conclusion, the camera had still not been removed. He was still going. He was still going on with the story.

What to do when everyone tells you that your hometown is shit

I think Rightmove is trying to kill me.

I don’t know, maybe I’m being paranoid, I just really get the feeling that someone there wants me dead.

I’m currently flat hunting, and by flat hunting I mean that I spend my lunch breaks wearily trawling through Rightmove, bookmarking the same flats that I bookmarked yesterday. However, it seems that no matter what area of Birmingham I type in, no matter what postcode I’m seeking, Rightmove shows me a perfectly furnished, perfectly priced flat in Ladywood.

For those who don’t know, Ladywood is an inner-city area in Birmingham. It featured in Benefits Street earlier in the year, not long ago held the title for the highest unemployment rate in the UK and is somewhere that you could definitely get a gun if you wanted to get a gun. It regularly pops up in Bravo documentaries about gangs and I would last approximately three weeks if I lived there. Maybe four, if I got a gun.

In short, it’s not a particularly nice place to live. However, would I say that to someone who lived there? No. No, I would not.

That’s not because they’re all drug-dealing gun toting bad eggs, though. They’re not. I wouldn’t say it because I’m not a dick.

Lot’s of people are dicks, though and if you come from somewhere that’s not as nice as most parts of the south of England, then people will tell you that where you come from is a shithole. If they’re feeling tactful, they’ll pull a face. It’s basically a shithole or face situation.

I’m not sure when it became ok to take the piss out of where someone lives to their face. Personally, I blame panel shows. Seriously, watch Dave and take a drink every time Jimmy Carr takes the piss out of Wolverhampton, or Slough, or somewhere that isn’t the Home Counties. You’ll be smashed by the time they’ve stretched a 25 minute show into a 40 minute show.

The way I see it, where you live is like your sibling, or a grossly misjudged haircut – you can say whatever you like about it (or them, depending on how good your relationship with your sibling is), but everyone else has to stay quiet or else you’ll punch them.

Punching people ain’t cool though, so here are three tips to stop you from chinning the person who started having a whip round the second they found out you weren’t from London.

1. Accept that they will do the accent.
Seriously, make peace with it, because it’s like a fucking reflex for some people. I went to Sussex University, so I spent three years listening to kids from Watford try and do a Brummie accent. Some sounded Liverpudlian, some sounded Geordie and others sounded like they’d had a stroke. The most effective response? A patronising smile, with a head tilt thrown in for good measure.

2. Don’t bother trying to defend where you’re from.
Last year, my local newsagents had a sign in the window advertising half price ‘raping paper’, I’m pretty sure that if I ever sat in a café and tried to read a book I would be burned as a witch and a local pub has just started advertising it’s new pulled pork burger – that’s a little summary of Kingswinford, the town I live in. It’s where the King kept his pigs, according to one of my primary school teachers. I’m pretty sure this is total bullshit because surely, as the king, wouldn’t you keep your pigs close to where you live, just incase you wanted to see them or count them or roast them and eat them and stuff? And, as far as I know, no kings have ever lived here. The place my family calls home was once judged as fit for pigs to live in, so yeah, you could say where I live is a bit shit.
It’s also not that bad though. There is some pretty countryside near by, two branches of Five Guys have opened and Birmingham has some great pubs, so things are getting better all the time.
Would I launch into a passionate defense of all that the West Midlands has to offer, though? Draw a little map on the back of a napkin for the unimpressed North Londoner who asked whether you ‘can even get Tapas in Birmingham’?
Would I fuck. I mean, I’m not asking them to produce an off the cuff Zagat guide to Kent, so I sure as hell wouldn’t do the same.

3. Say this to them, in your head.
You know what? We can’t all live in London. It’s expensive and far away from our ill grandparents and there are too many bus numbers.  Other places that aren’t London are ok, too, for now. And you, you’re twenty-fucking-two; you didn’t strive to get a mortgage on a gorgeous little house in Tunbridge Wells, your parents did. You got lucky, so fucking shut up. Sometimes people just have to live somewhere, build a life there and be fine with it.
But remember, you say that in your head.

Maybe I’ll be in London in five years time, maybe I’ll be in Ladywood or maybe I’ll be somewhere in between. Wherever I am, though, when we get pulled into a conversation fuelled only by small talk, just promise me one thing. When I tell you where I live, promise that you’ll greet the revelation in exactly the same way that I greet yours - with complete nonchalance.