I trod in some dog poo on the way back from lectures today. Dog poo is smelly and sticky so it was quite a depressing experience from that point of view, but walking home smelling slightly of poo wasn’t the worst part of the experience.
Your mum’s standard advice upon treading in anything nasty is to go and wipe it off on some nearby grass. This seemed like pretty sound advice for an initial clean; whilst I would perhaps have to upgrade to something a bit more stiff and bristly for the final removal from the depths of the treads (perhaps AstroTurf or a nearby chav’s over-gelled hair), it would probably get most of it off, and stop me leaving a trail of exponentially-thinning shit behind me wherever I walked.
What depressed me was that there wasn’t any grass to be found. My poo encounter occurred about half a mile from college, but I couldn’t think of any patches of grass either on or a short deviation from my route. The nearest one was a graveyard, but I thought it was probably a bit much to leap a spiky fence onto sacred ground if your only purpose was to deposit some poo. Especially if it’s not even your own poo. And double especially if it’s Hallowe’en and ghosts or zombies might come out and kick your ass.
It’s sad when even one of our oldest cities can’t muster anything but concrete, slabs and tarmac, and it’s even more sad that my jaded modern eye doesn’t spot this wholesale greyness unless it has a specific and selfish desire for grass.
So, I walked back to college and wiped my shoe on the grass in Peck. Sadly, the now exponentially-thinned crap on the ridges of the tread was all that was removed by the floppy, ineffectual natural grass, leaving a residual sea of brown goo.
For an account of the rest of my afternoon, follow the brown trail.