Much of English humour is very toilet based.
Certainly the subject of loose bowels is thought of as highly amusing.
And mostly I would have agreed. After all, twenty-four hours of discomfort and inconvenience and it usually all over.
Well, I now know that there's a different story to be told as well.
It all began on the Wednesday morning. I went into work but was up and down from my seat so often that I went home at lunchtime. There followed 36 hours of fairly constant purging.
Unfortunately, I had to be in work on the Friday morning. I had a verification meeting for our proposed PTLLS course and someone from City and Guilds was coming in to check my work. So, dosed up to the eyeballs, I went into work, had the meeting and then came straight back home again. There followed another 12 hours of wretchedness.
Saturday morning, I got up after a more rested night and evacuated. I stood up, turned round and looked down into the toilet bowl expecting to see a mess.
The water was scarlet with blood.
To say that I was somewhat shocked would be an understatement.
So, not panicking, I contacted the out-of-hours surgery and was a bit miffed when the doctor did not seem too concerned. If I'd been fountaining a jet of blood some three metres into the air, he might have given me some attention but a little bit of bleeding from the back passage was very unexciting to him.
I suppose I could have taken some comfort from that but I was put out that I wasn't taken seriously.
The bleeding, apparently, was from the same veins as produce hemorrhoids. They are close the anus and so, given the constant stream of liquid that had been forcing its way past them, they had become inflamed and were leaking. I guess the same sort of thing happens in your nasal cavity when you have a cold. The fact that the blood was scarlet indicates that it was only recently released into my bowel. Had the blood been of a more blackened hue, that would have signified a bleed somewhere much higher up and that would have been more serious.
Anyhow, the doctor recommended all the things that I had been doing plus bunging myself up with anti-diarrhoea tablets (and, by the way, Sainsbury's own brand has exactly the same ingredients as the proprietory brands and is half the price). He also advocated waiting to see what happened next.
What happened next was another couple of days of discomfort followed by a gradual return to more normal bowel movements.
I'd had nearly a week of rear end uncertainty.
I don't think that I shall be quite so quick to laugh at incontinence jokes in the future.