Mirth and Woe: Scat

Mirth and Woe: Scat

An awful tale of blind revenge

I was young. I was broke. I needed money to fuel my 2000AD habit.

Still undergoing therapy after a couple of years doing a paper round at Darth Vader's newsagents, I was willing to do just about anything that kept me away from Pete McCarthy's [no relation] half-naked, horse-faced mother.

An understanding relative got me a job at a local stable.

I was paid to shovel shit. Again.

That's the trouble with understanding relatives. They know that you've spent your formative years digging horse shit to raise funds for your scout troop's minibus; and they get some mad idea that you actually enjoy the intimate company of turds. Poo, they believe, plays some sort of major part in your life. How wrong can they be?

So, once again, my life is dominated by horse shit. And not fresh crap, either, this came from the "well-rotted" pile as the stable themselves twigged that there really was money in crap, and wanted to sell it to local gardeners, cutting the Dyb-dyb-dobs out of the equation.

We were led, hardly screaming at all, to an all-too-familiar steaming pile of shit and straw, handed shovels and pitchforks, and told in no uncertain terms to get on with it. Oh God, not again.

For my efforts, I was to be paid the princely sum of one pound a day. Bring your own lunch. The bloody Barbour-jacketed slave-drivers. Kids who complained about this so-called exploitation were told not to come back, "as there are plenty more young people out there who'd LOVE to work here with our wonderful horses".

The only horses I saw while I worked there happened to be under the saddles of other Barbour-jacketed wankers, whilst I was shoveling their exhaust products into large plastic sacks for 12p per hour. We wage slaves, thinking no further than where the next quarter of sherbert lemons was coming from, just kept our heads down and dug.

The stable owners bagged up all the crap we diligently mucked out of the stables and sold it to local gardeners for rather more than a pound a bag, a state of affairs we found distinctly unfair. I blame Gardener's World entirely for this distasteful exploitation of the proletarian masses. Titchmarsh, you're a bastard.

We vowed that something should be done. Something dreadful. Something ironic.

As soon as Mrs Horsey Bitch's back was turned, our plan swung into bowel-tingling action, in a manner that would have made the A-Team proud. All involved contributed. No love lost, for we knew there was no shame left in our lives.

Done, we returned to our drudgery, knowing full well the terrible revenge we had wrought on the unsuspecting gardeners of Berkshire. Then, at the end of a tiring day, Mrs Horsey Bitch came to see us off, pressing a hideously mangled pound note into our hands as we left, in a manner that suggested she had just wiped her bottom on it. We all vowed, there and then, never to return.

I'd estimate then, that about two per cent of bargain bags of manure sold from Lower Conman's Farm that spring contained a genuine honest-to-goodness human poo, donated with our grateful thanks. I'd love to see their tomatoes.