Tales from the Orient Episode 1 - Dan and the Case of the Dire Rear

Well then. Christmas has been summarily despatched with a bullet straight between its dewy little festive eyes, and New Years was last seen being loaded into an ambulance after drinking the stuff under the sink. I hereby pronounce the festive season dead. Hooray!

That done, I suppose I'd better get on with doing a blog of some kind. So I'm going to tell you a story that happened over 2 years ago, to a man very much like me. A man so much like me that even his closest friends would have difficulty telling us apart. Assuming of course, that his closest friends knew me too, which they would have done, seeing as this is actually a story about me and the last few sentences were merely a misjudged attempt at setting the tone. Well done Dan, you ham-fisted dork.

Anyway, the tale I'm about to relate began many miles from here, in a hot and dusty land, on a bus. A sleeper bus, to be precise. Now the first thing you should know about a sleeper bus - especialy a sleeper bus in Kazakhstan (which is where this particular sleeper bus was) - is that they are absolutely impossible to sleep on. They come with bunks, sure, but what if the only bunk left to you and your travel companion was the big quadruple one at the back? What if that bunk already had a large kazakh woman in it? And what if every two minutes the bus went over a pot-hole and catapulted the three of you into the air and then back down on top of each other? What then?

Well, the picture pretty much sums it up. We'd bounce in the air, fall back down, burst out laughing, and repeat. The bus we were on was the direct bus through from Almaty - which is the former capital of Kazakhstan, to Urumqi - which is the largest city in Western China. The journey was scheduled to take about 24 hours, half of which would be on lumpen Kazakh tracks and the other half on lovely smooth Chinese communist roads. Which meant for 12 solid hours we were bouncing into the air, laughing, and accidentally molesting the unfortunate woman on the other bunk (who took it all in very good grace).

Unfortunately, after all this physical exercise, we'd worked up quite an appetite once we'd crossed the border. Not having had the presence of mind to bring any Chinese money with us, we were forced to accept the generous gift of a dubious-looking goat kebab, at a fly-blown rest-stop, from a man with gold front teeth. Now, he was possessed of a generous, 24-carat smile, which is probably the only reason we felt obliged to eat the knobbly, undercooked meat from the skewer. He looked on, occasionally encouraging us wuth the words 'Yum yum', like some terrifying Central Asian gremlin. And we both polished off the whole thing.

I imagine you can guess where this is leading by now.

After a strange half sleep as we clunked through the Chinese night, we awoke at 5.30 in the morning in the middle of Urumqi. Our map was 7 years out of date, neither of us could speak Chinese, and we didnt have a hotel booked. However, all of these problems paled into insignificance when weighed up against the strange churning sensation that we were both experiencing deep down inside.

But the kraken sleepethed - for now anyway - so we set about finding some lodgings. We both knew it was only a matter of time before the tide would turn, so to speak.

Fortunately, we were aided in our search by a man who wore pinstriped trousers, pointy shoes, and bounded up to us demanding to know whether we were American. We told him that we weren't, and he warmed to us immediately. We both came to the conclusion that he was either a used-car dealer, a pimp, or both, so we sensibly got into the taxi that he hailed for us and went with him to find a hotel. And not a moment too soon.

I would estimate that from this point, me and David (my travel companion) expunged our bowels regularly every ten minutes for two entire days. Occasionally Dos (the pointly shoed car-saleman pimp who turned out to be neither - just a truly nice person) would come to our room and stop in for a chat, and more regularly one of the hotel's numerous prostitutes would try to muscle in to give us a 'massage'. Dave took it upon himself to remove these bodily and place them protesting outside the door, while they ran their fingers over his blond eyebrows and I desperately tried to stop myself pooing the bed.

Eventually the flood abated, leaving Dave with no ill effects, and me with two large, rather painful hemorrhoids.

This is not a story that shows me in a particularly flattering light.

It was at this point that I became concerned. I hadn't been very concerned before, when I was pooing, because I knew how that went and was pretty certain it would stop. But now I was in over my head. I couldn't go around with these... things, irritating me indefinitely. So I did what any sane man does. I decided to go to a pharmacy and get something to fix them.

This is where I ran into a snag. All the nearby pharmacies were Chinese. In fact, there wasn't a non-Chinese pharmacy for hundreds of miles, because I was in China, which I was soon to find out is the home of the Chinese pharmacy. So the pharmacies were Chinese and I was clearly not. All the pharmacists spoke Chinese, and I did not. This, it seemed to me, would make ordering pile cream pretty damn difficult.

But then I hit upon an idea. And this is really what the whole story has been leading up to. I decided to draw some cartoons. Some simple doodles which would explain my predicament in a language so universal I couldn't help but be understood. And while I was going through some of my stuff the other day, I found them.

So, here for you, in a cut-out-and-keep fashion, are Dan's 5 Must-have Cartoons for Ordering Hemorrhoid Cream in a Foreign Country.

#1 - The Basic Strip

A simple one, this. Lack of artistic skill notwithstanding, even an idiot could clearly see what I need from this simple cartoon. Frame 1 depicts the cream, frame 2 indicates the area of my discontent, frame 3 demonstrates the correct way to administer the cream, and frame 4 depicts my resulting mood.

But, I thought, I'd better have a few more to fall back on if for some peculiar reason this one didn't do the trick. Which brings us to...

#2 - The 'Flaming Obvious'

Again, pretty easy to tell what is needed here. If you're a young Chinese girl working in a pharmacy and a foreign man thrusts this at you, you will surely infer that he is suffering from a 'hot and fiery' backside and requires some cream to ease his pain. You will also take the smiley at the bottom in the way it is intended - as the grateful scrawlings of a desperate man.

You couldn't possibly take this to be some kind of peculiar or obscene come-on, could you? No, of course not. But, to be safe...

#3 - The Empathic Tube

Ok, even I agree that this one is a bit weird. What I was trying to convey was a tube of cream 'thinking' about the purpose for which it is intended. In this case, the tube is thinking of a person, and the arrows indicate the region of the person that the tube is particularly keen to visit. However, to ensure that the pharmacist didn't think I was after a concoction for my cock or a balm for my balls, you can see that I have expertly drawn a nice rounded bottom on the stick man to clear up any confusion.

Ok, thought not. How about...

#4 - The Happy Arse

Look at it. It's as clear as the nose on your face. Angry fire-breathing bottom is calmed by tube of cream and replaced by smiling posterior of joy. The only problem being that I will never be able to hand this to a stranger, Chinese or not, for fear that they would call the authorities.

So, it's all down to this one...

#5 - The 'WTF?'

Right, I'll walk you through it. In the first frame, that's me talking to the pharmacist. I'm the smiling one, she has a question mark of her head (and who can blame her).

In the second frame, I am handing her this cartoon (in a sort of art-imitating-life kind of way), and you can see my discomfort from my frowny expression and exploding undercrackers.

In the third frame, I am imagining a tube of cream. Arrows and explosions indicate the problem region, as in most medical handbooks.

In the fourth frame, comprehension has dawned and she is handing me my cream, while from out-of-frame a giant three-fingered hand has zoomed in to give the whole performance a resounding thumbs-up.

So there it is - five geniune cartoons by my own fair hand, from my days in the orient. The almost unbelievable thing is that I did eventually manage to procure some cream for my maladjusted bottom. But this was after some more adventures, involving horses, nomads and icy-cold mountain streams, and I will have to leave this story for another time. Preferably another life.

In the meantime, watch what you eat!

Buried in Pomposity is written by Dan. He shouldn't be allowed to leave the house, let alone the country.