I Pissed on My Foot

Around 4am I awoke with a full bladder. Outside in the back garden it was cooler than I had anticipated and the dewy lawn was cold underfoot. In a clear sky the Southern Cross was where it was supposed to be and the sound of the sea was coming from the southeast. As I relieved myself some urine splashed onto my left foot. Annoyed, I directed the stream further from me. At the same time, the sensation registered in my brain and I was surprised at how hot it had felt. Body temperature. That’s how hot my blood must be. Experimentally, I directed the stream, which was still strong, downward, and again felt the hot wet sensation. Annoyance was replaced by pleasure. Abandoning inhibition, I began to douse my bare toes and relished the delicious warmth. I recognised it as the same guilty pleasure when voiding inside a wetsuit, or that initial feeling of relief that jolts one out of a dream that could end in disaster. Recklessly, I pissed all over my foot before aiming the last of the dwindling stream away to the right. I could already feel my foot going horribly cold, and the wetness between my toes and the feeling of standing with one foot in an icy puddle disgusted me. Now I would have to wash my feet under the garden tap and go inside and thoroughly dry off before returning to bed. Why had I given in to such a rash impulse?

Lying under the covers waiting to warm up before drifting back to sleep, I thought about what I had just done, and it now struck me as comical rather than shameful. After all, this was a matter between me and my left foot, and involved nobody else. What is more, it was far less reprehensible than the behaviour my father had once indulged in as a young man. It amused me to think that I could see similarity in what he had done more than 80 years ago and my recent escapade in the garden.

When he was in his late seventies or early eighties, we had a conversation about getting drunk. I said it was a long time since I had been really drunk and that although I liked to tipple, I tried not to overdo it in dread of waking up with a hangover. In my youth I had been heavily inebriated on many occasions, even to the extent of falling over and suffering blackouts, or permanent memory loss, induced by alcohol poisoning. But I had never had the DT’s.

I told him about some of the alcoholics who had been admitted to A1, the medical ward at Groote Schuur where I worked for a time in the 70’s. They had to be restrained in bed until the delirium tremens wore off, all the while shouting in terror as they hallucinated.

“I can’t remember ever seeing you drunk, Dad. Not even unsteady on your feet.”

“No. But when I was in the Air Force, before I was married, I got horribly sozzled a few times.”

He then told me about the incident in question. It was before the War while he was stationed at Biggin Hill. He had been given a weekend pass, and on the Saturday he changed into civvies and went to a pub in a nearby village. In the course of the evening, he became progressively more intoxicated until he passed out. When he came round, he found himself in a doorway. As it was now late and there was no traffic, he realised he would have to walk a few miles back to base along a deserted country road.

After weaving his way for more than half an hour he began to feel a pressing need to evacuate his bowels. He went to the ditch at the side of the road and lowered his trousers. It then occurred to him that he should be doing this into a chamber pot and not on the ground like an animal. But where could he find a chamber pot? The only thing that remotely resembled one was his hat, which I assume was a trilby.

Having defecated into the trilby he straightened up and was buttoning his trousers when another wild thought entered his befuddled mind. Having paid good money for it, how could he abandon his trilby at the side of the road? Replacing the hat on his head, he then resumed his journey and staggered the remaining couple of miles back to base.

I was astounded and delighted by this anecdote. This was something a Samuel Beckett character would have done. That is why, if ever, like now, I think of impulsive and rash decisions I have made, I recall this episode and it takes the edge off any feeling of regret that might afflict me.

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