My nose grumbles and complains again and wants to send another slimey stream of congealed stuff out, I reach for the box of tissues. Thankfully these ones are tinged with Aloe Vera so instead of having red raw sandpapered folds of skin at the end of my nose I’ll have a soothing experience, but when will this stream of Mucozoid alien stuff stop flowing out of me? I brace myself for another expulsion, tense up every muscle and blow hard – out it shoots like I’m a building construction site and we’ve just thrown out a load of bricks down the skip at the top, down it tumbles and rockets hitting the sides landing in the skip in my hand- don’t want to look at that stomach turning oily gunge of green and yellow. I just want to lie back now and recover and breathe a bit through temporary passages.

When things are less serious the gently perfumed smell of a tissue is extremely pleasant when I have a hearty blow, just some bits of congealed muck in my nose that need releasing- sometimes that might be toilet tissue – that’s actually more heavily scented- Funny I think about a competition we had in high school to find names for toilet tissue that had a double letters- i.e for B it was Bum Brighteners, C was Crap cards, F was Fart Flatteners- others I won’t go into – this must also have been around the time of the ‘Grande Farting competition’ poster where descriptions of farts were printed up in bold type face- what was and wasn’t acceptable- i.e thunderclaps were ok, but dribblers- where a degree of bodily fluid escaped- meant immediate disqualification. Of course these things had us rolling round like hogs in mud with laughter. Or there was that time where I let one go – just as the class fell silent and the eruption reverberated on the wooden chair – the result – instantaneous cheering and laughing from the whole class, laughter hanging off the ceiling like a bunch of hungry seagulls fighting for scraps of food……