... except for last weekend which was one long moment that never seemed to vanish as I cooked lunch and dinner, and breakfast, lunch and dinner again for some 400 bikies. I had volunteered for a fundraiser with the Royal Volunteer Coastal Patrol at a motocross event where I peeled and chopped mountains of onions, and flipped and turned thousands of pancakes, sausages and steaks.
And I didn't eat any of it as I didn't want to hear the call of nature. To answer that call would have meant visiting one of those claustrophobic porta-potties. Judging by the hundreds of empties, from Jack Daniels to Jim Beam, and the number of onions I had chopped, the inside of those units would have been a rare sight and smell!
It would have brought back memories of "Kenny" (subtitled "A knight in shining overalls") which was 103 minutes of cinematic toilet humour about a warm-hearted, true-blue Aussie bloke by the same name, whose business it is to deliver port-a-loos - in his words, a recession-proof business as "it won't dry up overnight" - and who is the living embodiment of how to deal with the epithet "s**t happens".
Not all his humour is scatological: naturally, he's divorced since "any man who spends more time with other people's poo than with his own wife is bound to lose her". And he reckons next time he'll cut out the middleman and marry a woman he hates and give her a house and be done with! He doesn't own the business and doesn't make a shitload of money and, in any case, his employers are not Number One with Number Two; that position is held by somebody called "Henry the Turd". But, like shit to a blanket, Kenny sticks to his job, even knocking back a promotion to a desk-job which his dad urges him to take as "people don't look up to you until you sit down".
The film even gets educational: ever wondered where the word "shit" comes from? Well, listen to Kenny: "Certain types of manure used to be transported (as everything was back then) by ship. In dry form it weighs a lot less, but once water (at sea) hit it, it not only became heavier, but the process of fermentation began again, of which a by-product is methane gas. As the stuff was stored below decks in bundles you can see what could (and did) happen: methane began to build up below decks and the first time someone came below at night with a lantern - BOOOOM! Several ships were destroyed in this manner before it was discovered what was happening. After that, the bundles of manure where always stamped with the term 'S.H.I.T' on them which meant to the sailors to 'Ship High In Transit.' In other words, high enough off the lower decks so that any water that came into the hold would not touch this volatile cargo and start the production of methane." Bet you didn't know that one! And here I was, thinking it was an accounting term, especially at tax-time!
If you want a whiff of it, here's a trailer:
