Buttocks

I am icing my buttocks.

This is in part inspired by the Great British Bake Off. Don’t you just feel safe when you watch it? Like everything is benign, and the smell is wafting through the screen.

My ultimate way to watch it is on Sky+ so you can whizz through the boring history bits – merely padding to get the cost per minute down, presumably, or a way to tick the box of some sanctimonious BBC department, ‘Thought for the Day’ style.

Obviously, one also needs something delicious to eat whilst watching. Something treat-like. The problem is, you want something that mirrors what they’re cooking. No good eating chocolate if they’re doing wellingtons. I like an icecream cone or morsels of mature cheddar with special chutney.

I think there is a business opportunity in setting up kitchens equipped for hen parties and work awaydays to come and do technical challenges (well, easier ones – sausage plaits perhaps). Much more fun than ten-pin bowling or electro-zumba-pole-dancing.

In fact, as I type, there is an item on Radio 4 about how GBBO is boosting sales of kitchen equipment everywhere. Apparently it has almost twice the number of viewers of any other BBC 2 programme. And business in Lakeland is going through the roof. (How I used to love the Lakeland catalogue – spatulas and flat whisks are my kind of porn.)

I don’t want Brendan to win. Sorry. I’m sure he’s very nice, but in one of the VTs even his neighbours seemed fed up with him – they just took his proffered cake off him and closed the patio door. You could practically hear them saying ‘It’s that camp old guy from next door with some baked goods again – I just haven’t got time for him today’.

But back to my buttocks. In fact, I simply have an orthopaedic ice pack on them, because they are unbelievably painful. It is a close cousin to my back pain, and the whole area is feeling very knife-edge. I can’t take any decent painkillers, and rest and ice is the only temporary solution. The other key thing is not to lift Logie, which is pretty tricky. His affront is legendary, and produces real water tears and a koala cling to my legs, making it difficult to walk.

He also has a buttock issue at the moment. We see a lot of them. Because he often throws a complete shit fit when having his nappy changed, and refuses to put on trousers. It reminds me slightly of my brother Toby, who when having a tantrum when he was little (approximately seventeen, from memory) would start to strip off, regardless of where we were. Even in the supermarket. I’m so glad I accidentally mentioned that to his best man once, so it could be shared with all his wedding guests this summer.

I am a bit embarrassed about having buttock pain. Cos what I really want to say is ‘God, my bum hurts’, which sounds a bit dodge. Apparently it is a classic symptom of pelvic girdle pain in pregnancy, but even if I have got a touch of that, the real culprit is the prolapsed disc, sticking out and annoying the nerve like Logie taunts one of his friends who is trying to play nicely on their own.

When I first started this blog, Toby (who doesn’t read this blog, so far as I know, but I guess I’ll soon find out) kindly offered to share his minor ailments, and revealed that his physio has deemed that much of them are due to problems with his left buttock. I was delighted! Cos my left buttock is also the troublemaker. What a coincidence – as if we’re related or something. Thanks Mum and Dad for the left-buttock gene.

Perhaps we should do a survey of the rest of our family, to see how far it goes back. Was it caused by being Vikings who always had to row on the left-hand side? I wonder if there’s a history-medical-diversity department of the BBC who’d like to make a documentary about it.