bedpan

I was tearing round M&S on Sunday evening, just as they made the announcement that we had but 10 mins left to make our purchases and get the f@*k off the premises. I was picking up a fitted sheet that The Mothership had ordered for me, since she was helping the kids tidy up their cesspit of a room the other day and happened, unfortunately to peer into mine.

‘I’ve never seen the like of it,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘That bed of yours is like something a dog would sleep in.’

‘Well the cat does enjoy a good old snooze there,’I quipped.

She ignored that. The Mothership has very firm ideas about cats taking liberties, and her cat would get short shrift should it venture near a duvet.

‘I’m going to go online now,’ she said, ‘and order you a fitted sheet with extra depth because that’s what’s required for a mattress of that size.’

‘Can you get extra depth fitted sheets?’ I asked.

She was incredulous.

‘Nine years you’ve had that bed and you STILL don’t know what size of sheet to buy? What planet are you on?’

‘I just thought all fitted sheets were shite,’ I replied.

That didn’t please her one bit.

Anyway, she rang to tell me that there was a brushed cotton fitted sheet waiting at M&S Forestside for me and I was to pick it up and report back. Unfortunately, she told me this on Thursday evening after I’d been out to La Taqueria where I knocked back a Piso Sour and two fish-bowl sized glasses of Tempranillo.

‘What about the new sheet? Is it nice and warm on these cold nights?’she asked,  the next time she called.

Well I hadn’t a clue what she was on about. No one should tell me anything after 9pm of an evening, regardless of whether alcohol has been taken or not. I have huge difficulties retaining information these days.

The penny dropped anyway and down I raced at ten to six on Sunday, where a lovely girl found my order and said wasn’t I lucky to have such a lovely mother.

‘My mother wouldn’t be buying me a sheet,’ she said. ‘She’d be telling me to get my own.’

I agreed the on occasion the Mothership could be very kind, but that on others she could be an absolute melter. The girl smiled in sympathy.

Then I saw my pal Kristina waving over. ‘I have news!’ She said excitedly.

Now, normally when someone says that, you expect them to announce that there’re expecting or engaged or suchlike. But no. Kristina told me instead that she’d been sitting in Kaffe-O and got chatting to a randommer about the bedpan I mentioned on the blog in February.

I have become almost obsessed with the fact that the Concern charity shop on the Ormeau Road has had this grim looking bedpan as part of its window display for weeks now, and are charging a tenner for it.

‘Tell me more,’ I said, disregarding the fact that is was now 5.55pm and I still had the dinner to buy.

So, it turned out that Kristina had been in Kaffe O,  explaining to her son why she wouldn’t buy him a game of Connect Four from The Concern Shop because it was £1.50 dearer than a brand new one on Amazon.

(See? Didn’t I tell you that Concern was a rip-off? They don’t know what to charging.)

As she pointed this out to her child, the lady beside her chirped up and said that she too, found the prices in Concern rather steep. She said that she’d ALMOST bought the ‘vintage douche’ the week before because she had a plumber in fixing her toilet, thus rendering it out of action. However, (and this makes me want to meet this woman because she sounds like my sort of individual) she did the maths, and worked out that she could go to The Northern Lights and drink several half pints of cider, for the same price as buying a decrepit bedpan. This option enabled her to make use of their facilities, without the indignity of peeing into a receptacle and trying to dispose of the contents while a plumber looked on.

Imagine: it worked out better value to spend the afternoon in the pub, drinking cider, than to buy a second hand piss pot in a charity shop.

However, my pal was keen to highlight the absurdity of the whole conversation given that they were in Kaffe-o drinking oat-milk flat whites at the princely sum of £3.40.

But this, people, is what I flipping love about Belfast. It’s the craic. Imagine if you were sitting at a cafe in South Kensington, or at a bar in Bath. Would you be able to start chatting to a random person about whether a piss-pot was a tad overpriced or not? I doubt it. And that is why, despite the fact that the weather is shite;  most of the politicians are climate-change denying morons, and why a single accident on any of the arterial routes brings the city to a standstill, is why I wouldn’t live anywhere else.

Last weekend I opened up my Mac and up popped a window decreeing: ‘Groundhog Day’. No shit, I thought ruefully, sure isn’t that every day? This month has been long and dark, and the logistics of working full-time, imposing some sense of order on my house and acting as PA and Chief Entertainment Officer to my offspring, is proving hard to manage. Balls are being dropped all over the show. Friends have been neglected, appointments missed, and many are the chores left unfinished.

I was in puerile form altogether last week and thought that urgent action was required. I needed a pleasant Friday evening to obliterate all thoughts of Brexit, embrace frivolity and make room for joy. Isn’t that a brilliant phrase? It could be the title for my memoir: ‘How a Sour Wee Bastard Made Room for Joy.’ I don’t think it would exactly fly off the shelves though, as folk may find the juxtaposition too hard to fathom and assume I was either a sanctimonious twat, or a more rotund and decidedly less effectual Marie Kondo.

Back to Friday night. I did some yoga (which was very joyful) and then met my friend Arlene for a tipple and a Chinese meal. In we trotted to The Northern Lights first where we met a large shaggy haired lurcher. ‘This is what I LOVE about this lace,’ I gushed. ‘You get to drink some wine AND stroke a lovely dog.’

‘You and I are VERY different,’ said my friend, who doesn’t share my enthusiasm regarding the animals, either in or out of a drinking establishment.

We caught up over a Sauvignon Blanc before making our way down towards Macau by the bridge. But en route, as we passed the Concern Charity Shop, what should I spy but something that looked suspiciously like a bed pan, set prominently in the window. We had been walking at quite an accelerated pace since I heard that Macau did wonderful deep fried aubergine and I was keen to get stuck in. ‘Hang on there,’ I said to Arlene. ‘I need to get another look. Perhaps my eyes have deceived me.’

My eyes, however, had not. It was indeed a bed pan, although labelled (incorrectly I think), as a ‘Ceramic Vintage Douche’, selling for the princely sum of £10. ‘Who?’ I stuttered. ‘Why?’

‘You need to find out,’ said Arlene, ‘I need to know the rationale behind this decision.’

‘What sort of a person,’ I mused, ‘starts into their January clear-out, finds a bed pan, and thinks, “I’ll just drop this down to the charity shop.’’

‘What next?’ said Arlene. ‘A vibrator? ‘Just one previous careful owner?’’

How we chuckled.

That made me think of my first car, a lovely Nissan Micra, red in hue and dinky, like a motorised ladybird. It had ‘one careful lady owner,’ who only ever drove it between Bangor and Donaghadee. It was pristine when I got it and remained that way for all of 10 minutes until I rammed it into my parent’s back gate and later into a bottle bank at the old Co-op on the Lisburn Road. ‘Oh, I am vexed,’ The Mothership, used to say, upon seeing the latest dent. We called it ‘The Sour Car’, for obvious reasons.

We were still talking about the bed pan as we tucked into our pork dumplings. ‘It’s quite a personal item, though isn’t it, to give in to a charity shop?’ said my pal.

I nodded vigorously. ‘I can’t imagine saying, as I ‘Marie Kondo’d my house: ‘here’s a dress I’ll never squeeze into again; a Denby cup and saucer and oh, that bed pan I have kicking about under the bed.’

‘Some weirdo might buy it though for other uses,’ she said.

‘Like what?’ I said, hastily swallowing down a mouthful of wine lest I choke.

‘Did you not read about that post which almost brought down Mumsnet?’

I shook my head, oblivious to this altogether.

‘You know, the husband who had a post-coital clean-up routine involving a beaker, which prompted his wife to post a message asking if this was normal behaviour?’

My eyes widened. I definitely hadn’t heard of this, for I’m sure I would have remembered.

‘It’s a very funny read,’ said my friend. ‘Be sure to check it out.’

We got back to the Ormeau bed pan. She suggested that I purchase it and put it to immediate use as a planter for some geraniums. ‘It could be a short story,’ she said. ‘From the point of view of a bed pan. ‘Living My Best Life’ you could call it, with before and after photos.’

So on Saturday morning, despite feeling the effects of the previous evening’s exuberance, down I trotted to ‘Concern’ see if it was still in the window. And yes, there it was, nestled under a china tea set, a box of spoons and a blue tinkly bell. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good root round a charity shop, as my return to work has put paid to such excursions. This was a worthwhile venture, however, as I picked up a spangly top, a pink woolly jumper, a Nora Ephron book and a jigsaw for the children, (complete, I’d like to add, as there ought to be a dark corner of hell for anyone who considers it acceptable to donate a puzzle minus a few pieces)

As I paid up, I asked the gentleman on the till about the bedpan. ‘There’s an item in the window labelled ‘a vintage douche’ and I just wondered if you anything about it?’ He looked at me quizzically.  ‘A what?’ he said.

‘Well it’s labelled a ‘douche’, but I think it’s just a bed pan,’ I said. He raised an eyebrow and said that he’d have to see it for himself. Out he trotted after me. ‘No idea where that came from,’ he said. ‘I only work here on a Saturday.’ Do you think it will sell?’ I asked.

‘Goodness yes, he replied. ‘People always buy this sort of thing. Anything useful goes very quickly.’

He was very pleasant, the man, and seemed quite amused by my line of inquiry. I do like Concern, although it can be pricier than other charity shops along the Ormeau. One gets more of a bargain in The Hospice Shop, as indeed I did, a few minutes later, picking up an M&S leopard print skirt or £3.25. Once, in Concern, I lifted a pair of roller boots for my Older Child. They were £8, which seemed to come as quite a shock to the elderly gent behind the till.  He said, and I quote, ‘Jesus Christ, I thought you were meant to get a bargain in here,’ and gave them to me for a fiver.

So there you are folks. What I want to know is this: would any of you good people either think to heave a bed pan into a charity shop, should one be  lurking on your premises, or would you be inclined to buy one? I’m not convinced this particular pan was worth a tenner by the way, but you may strike lucky and get an understanding chap when you go to make your purchase. It looked in need of a good scrub too, although any residual urine, could, I suppose, bring on the growth of any potential herbs or plants. You know me- always looking for the sunny side….