...i like stories

I presume everyone has a friend (or maybe it's you), the kind whose life is like a finely scripted black comedy. The friend who is terribly unlucky in a variety of endeavours, though usually from backing the wrong horse, often with hilarious results. A friend who's life Shakespeare could have written another two decades of tragi-comedies about.

I have a friend like that, but fortunately he has a great sense of humour regarding the regular mini-disasters that pepper his life.

This friend, let's call him Peter, has dog with a human name, let's call him Phillip. Phillip is a labradoodle, and in the free-spirited manner of his owner, is completely untrained. Well Pete's mother came around one Sunday morning to visit him and his two kids, who stay at Dad's every second weekend. This Sunday morning Pete flushed the toilet after using it, only to find it blocked, and its latest contents came spewing up and out across the floor. After a while of running around with scoops and mops, plungers etc. in an unsuccessful attempt to unblock the loo, Pete's mum revealed that she needed to use the toilet, and rather urgently. Pete had until this point resisted calling the emergency plumber, being in a rental with a lousy landlord and thus no good prospect of getting the bill refunded. But mum couldn't wait any longer by this stage and very crossly headed out the back with toilet paper in hand. She returned a while later saying "I hope you're happy, making your old mum have to go to the toilet outside!". As Pete recounted to me, it's bad enough having your dunny flood your house without your neurotic mum having to crap in your backyard".

A short time later Phillip came bounding through the backdoor, looking pleased as punch. Pete bent down to pat his beloved pooch, and then the smell hit him like brickwall. Phillip looked up, brown smears around his mouth which could literally be described as a 'shit eating grin'.

At this stage of the story I was on the floor, my sides hurting. Pete laughed "It's bad enough that your toilet floods and your mum shits in your backyard, without your dog eating it".