ENGLISH MUM: never knowingly undercatered

So I was talking to J today and as usual we were wittering on about all sorts of rubbish (how to stop Bertie nicking the biscuit tin and eating all the bourbons, how far it is to Tullamore, that kind of thing) and she usually makes me laugh a lot but today, blimey, I swear I nearly wet myself I laughed so much. Here’s the story:

‘I was in the shower’, she said, ‘when I looked down and noticed I had a big, amber bead stuck to my stomach. Thinking that this was a bit strange, I had a closer look at the big amber bead and it turned out to be…a gigantic, enormous, massive yellow blister.’ Well, this apparently prompted a hysterical bout of running randomly around the bathroom and the bedroom whilst screaming like a girl until, finally running out of puff, she had to lie down on the bed (still squealing) while C (enjoying his role a little too much for my liking) popped the bloody great thing with a needle. Well, all this was enough to have me collapsed on the office floor, but then she casually mentioned: ’so C put some tom-cat’s piss on it…’ ‘Whoa, hold the bus’, shouts I, interrupting her flow, ’some what?’ ‘Oh, TCP. For some reason C calls it tom-cat’s piss.’

Well that just tipped me right over the edge and I laughed until my ribs hurt at the thought not only of J running round the house naked and with a mysterious, gigantic pustule on her stomach, but even worse, at C administering that old Laois remedy, a hefty dowsing of tom cat’s piss.

Laugh? I nearly laid an egg.