Wednesday, June 13, 2001

I'm currently on one of my health kicks. Of course, with me, a health drive does not involve actually doing any exercise, eating healthily or giving up alcohol. No, it just means I chuck a couple of packs of vitamins into my shopping basket alongside the three bottles of Chilean red. Yesterday I went to Holland and Barrett and bought some huge jars of St John's Wort and multivitamins. The vitamins are huge speckled brown things that look like something you'd worm your dog with. They smell like something you'd give your dog, too. And that's just on the way in. They have some strange effects on the way out - my urine is an intense fluorescent yellow; and it smells like brewers yeast.

This reminds me of something very, very silly I did when I was young...

I was 18, and I'd heard that appetite suppressants made you high. I browsed the shelves of the local chemist and took the cheapest diet pills I could find to the counter. The chemist didn't think to ask why an overly skinny lad would need slimming aids. The recommended dosage was two tablets, so I reckoned that in order to have the desired effect, I should take triple that. So I popped six pills down my throat. The pills were small, round and - and this is the important bit - bright turquoise.

I then went to my favourite local gay bar and had a couple of beers while I waited for the effects to kick in. Nothing. I had another beer, but still no change. All that beer had made me need a pee, however, and I went to the loo. Now, this bar had a wonderful old-fashioned urinal - a long, gleaming expanse of white porcelain stretching into the distance. There were four of five other men there, so I positioned myself at one end and began to pee...

My urine was bright turquoise. It was the colour of the first flush after you've put a new Jeyes Blue freshener in your toilet. Once I'd started peeing, I couldn't stop, and I stared in fascinated horror as this ultramarine stream gushed out of me and sloshed down towards the drain. The others at the urinal turned to see where this blue stuff was coming from, their eyes following it back along the porcelain, up to the source, my dick: "Jesus Christ, son, are you OK?"

The irony was that the pills I took did not contain anything mind-altering - they were not appetite suppressants, but laxatives. I spent the next two days curled up in agony around the toilet!

Here endeth the lesson.

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