It's an ill wind...

Aha! I know now why I was sick. It turns out that, far from being on the threshold of my eternal reward as feared, all I needed was a simple, honest-to-goodness fart to set me right. Several farts in fact. So for two days solidly, I've been farting. And yea, I hath saw that it was good and believed stoutly in my oaken heart. And lo, on the third day, I doth return to work, and with apologies to those who read with a lisp, you know once I get out the olde English that I doth not fucketh about here.

Now, I'm not considering a career in medicine or getting ahead of myself or anything, but I don't think it's stretching it to say that the humble fart as a panacea for minor ailments may well be the breakthrough discovery of our times. It worked for me, so it must be true.

Future visits to the doctor will be interesting if he has to drape me across his couch and start working my trailing leg like I'm a water pump, just to get me back on the straight and narrow.

You might snigger, but I've studied the matter at close quarters. Confined to bed with a queasy stomach and the irreconcilable condition of feeling constantly hungry but being unable to eat, my innards rose up in sympathetic rebellion and simply farted themselves back to good health. Amazing stuff. I think my stomach was wondering had my throat been cut, and decided to cleanse itself from the inside out to get things back to the ten square meals a day situation it normally enjoys.
It was fascinating how my body could heal itself in such a manner, although the bum symphonics got to such a pitch and frequency that at one stage I was genuinely worried I'd fart myself inside out, and be found dead and crumpled in the corner like a deflated sex doll, my mouth coincidentally contorted in a large 'O' of terror.

I shouldn't have worried. My intestine clearly knows what it's doing and so it just parped and trumpeted along like an intermittent tuba solo for two whole days, until it could fart no more. I went through the full repertoire - the deep basal farts, the high-pitched squeaky farts, the farts that sound like a zip being pulled up really quickly, the pfffffft-y gaseous farts, the pop-pop-pop farts, the splutter farts that tail off and sound like an old tractor labouring up a hill, and even the odd really strange-sounding randomer curveball fart that sounds like you're under water or farting into a tin bucket or something.

Finally though, at about 18.43 yesterday evening, while watching Hymen Wye on the telly, my guts convulsed for the last time and expelled the last of the virus, a little wheezy, almost apologetic effart that sounded like a set of bagpipes exhaling in some forgotten cupboard. I rose to my feet and smiled, for then I knew I was cured. I walk tall among you now, rid of the flatus that bound me.

And no, they weren't smelly.

And what the feck is Milco doing back in Hymen Wye in the first place?