Apples

When I was about eight years old our family moved into a new house. It was bigger than our old one, but had been empty for a year and therefore had more dead flies per square foot than anywhere I have seen before or since. It did, however, have two apple trees in the garden. One provided apples you could eat, while the other produced "cooking apples" - too sour to eat from the tree but great in pies and stuff. The first year we borrowed an apple picker (a long stick with a bag on the end) and collected as many as we could. Lots fell on the ground where the dog, which was very stupid, treated each apple as an entirely unfamiliar object to be chewed and appeared surprised every time to find that it didn't like the taste.

(This, by the way, was a Dalmatian, a dog posessed of no great intelligence but an enormous amount of enthusiasm and cunning when it came to acquiring illicit food. This meant that it's voracious appetite was often satiated by stupid things, like dung, lard or, inevbitably, its own vomit.)

We very soon discovered that you could only eat so many apples, and so many apple pies. My mum explored new and bizarre ways to use our free apple bounty, including making apple jelly, which was an odd-tasting substitute for jam obtained by straining mashed apples and sugar through old net curtains. And such apples as we couldn't use were individually wrapped in newspaper and stored in boxes in a cold room in the house where they decayed at various rates and made the whole house smell, not surprisingly, of apples.

I have to say that my family explored many uses for apples, but later in life I was to discover that there were, in fact, more than even we had considered; some that I'm sure would never have occurred to most people. For instance it would not have seemed desirable, nor indeed possible, to stuff a whole apple up my own arse but I am assured that there are people out there for whom this is an enjoyable recreation. One of the features of having a brother in the medical field is that you get to hear those stories about people who showed up at the emergency room with some piece of fruit or other inanimate object jammed up their tradesman's entrance.

I'm not going to say that I understand the bloke with the apple up his arse - I don't - but it seems positively well-adjusted when compared with the light bulb. How bored do you have to be for your eye to start wandering round the room looking for things to stuff up there? I mean, I've seen some pretty dull television too, but not even two hours of The View, which would have most sane people searching for Dr.Kevorkian's home number, would incite me to grab a household object and drop my pants.

And I'm no expert on human anatomy but it seems a pretty well established fact that your arse will spring shut the moment you let it (hence the schoolboy joke - "Why are turds pointed at one end? So your arse doesn't shut with a clang.) Just what do these people think will happen when the apple is all the way in?

While we're on the subject, you remember that joke about the two men captured by tribesmen and told to choose death or Mau Mau? They choose Mau Mau, so the chief sends them off into the wilderness to collect ten nuts. The first one comes back with ten walnuts and the chief tells him to pull down his pants and bend over while they stuff the all nuts up his arse; this is Mau Mau - if he is successful he can go free. Well they push them in one by one while the bloke grabs his ankles and they're all the way up to nine when he suddenly bursts out laughing and all the nuts fly out of his arse. The chief tells him he now must die but asks him why he laughed when he was so close. The man replies "Because I just saw my mate come back and he's brought coconuts."

Anyway, it's time for dessert and I'm having a banana. The conventional way.

If you enjoyed this post there's probably something wrong with you, but for people like you there is now brand new Bison Bits, for shorter versions of the kind of crap that you find in this journal. Enjoy! And don't walk near the fruitbowl while naked; no-one believes that excuse anymore...


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison