Dear Brain
What a shapely and ornamental article I was in my heyday! How rotund and fulsome, how firm yet buoyant, how curvaceous yet slender! Oh how eminently pattable was I, how kneadable, how caressable! How trim! I was as shapely a backside as ever adorned the end of a trunk, as ever overlooked a thigh or collop, as ever saucily sported itself before the eye of misfortune!
How I scorn the term buttocks; they remind me of so much dead meat.
They have labelled me bum, bottom, backside, arse, croup, rump and coccyx but what care I! I am what I am, a simple posterior designed to enforce the rut, to break the fall, to suffer the kick, to steady the scrum, to sit on the fence, to press the case, to soften the shock, to bear the brunt.
I have been threatened with more kicks and, perversely, invited more kisses than any other part of the anatomy. Alas, I have received too many of the former and none of the latter. I doubt if it will ever be resolved whether posteriors were just made to be kicked or whether the brain draws the kicks upon us. It’s like trying to decide which was there first, the hen or the egg, the whore or the pimp. I have watched silently as our own feet, left and right, aimed themselves after a retreating posterior whose owner had been aggressive or insulting. Similarly I have seen you kick a bending figure on the rear end for no reason at all. I heard you justify your actions afterwards by suggesting that as surely as stones were made to be flung so were arses made to be kicked; your very own words my dear lord and master.
Unlike Gaul I am only divided into two parts. Yet there exists no partition for we are really one. Can you imagine a posterior with only one cheek? Could anything be more ridiculous? I remember the first kick which ever jolted me into the harsh realities of coexistence. You were but a ten-year-old whilst the man who kicked me was eighty. Much as I resented that kick it was, I felt, richly deserved. You had callously taken the life of one of his three ducks, the remnants of a once populous clutch which he had vainly hoped would provide him with eggs for his daily needs. The stone which you flung would not normally arrive within an ass’s roar of the target but on this tragic occasion the duck was smitten on the very top of its head. Death was instantaneous. You were caught in the act and the old man implanted a kick which you were to feel for several weeks afterwards. That was the first of many. Kicks, however, I could accept but not permanent disfiguration which was to be my lot when you reneged on your fees in a seedy massage parlour. Before you had time to draw on your trousers the madame, quick as a flash, inscribed the sign of the cross with a razor blade on my left cheek where the mark remains to this day as a caution to masseuses everywhere that they were not to be duped by your innocent face but were to demand their fees in advance.
Some months later as your mother handed you a towel in the bathroom she could not help but notice the transverse lacerations which dominated my left cheek. Shocked beyond words she demanded an explanation. Hastily wrapping the towel around me, thereby concealing the crude disfiguration, you explained without batting an eyelid that it was part of an initiation ceremony. Inveterate liar that you were you convinced the poor woman that you were now, as a result of the sacred inscription, a member fully-fledged of a society devoted to the propagation of the Catholic faith, a society which expressly forbade its members to wear their hearts on their sleeves but rather wished them to pursue their vocations secretly and discreetly. You brought tears to the poor woman’s eyes when you explained that the reward for such unselfish devotion would come not in this life but in the next. She never doubted you and you salved your conscience by convincing yourself that you wished to spare her the seamier side of your more mundane activities.
As the years rolled by and your paunch began to protrude so did I begin to obtrude in the opposite direction until the specially tailored slacks and trousers which fitted your once lithe figure so admirably had to be disposed of for good to be substituted by the baggy britches which are anathema to females. Drink was the chief reason for my expansion. You might have held the obesity at bay had you moderated your intake and indulged in jogging or even walking, although my innate honesty compels me to recount an isolated occasion when you ran several hundred yards without stopping until your goal was attained.
You had dined well, as I remember, but then there was never an occasion when you did not dine well. On the evening in question, while the stomach laboured incessantly to digest the beef, the pudding, the potatoes, the assorted vegetables, the gravy, the sweet and the cheese, you fell into a deep slumber in front of the sitting room fire. Around you sat your loving family, your well-preserved, pseudo-aristocratic wife and charming daughters. Your snoring soon dominated all the other sounds of the room. After a while the snores grew fitful and uneven. Your wife, believing you to be the victim of a nightmare, called into your ear that there was no need for alarm. When you spluttered into wakefulness she repeated the assurance.
‘No need for alarm!’ you echoed in consternation as you noted the hands of the mantelpiece clock. The time was twenty minutes to eleven which was the precise and blessed hour the taverns closed their doors for the night. You leaped from the armchair like a scalded cat and without donning hat or overcoat dashed out of doors and ran through the streets like a man demented until you reached the nearest pub.
If I were ever asked to nominate that part of your body which was subjected to the most exercise I would, without hesitation, declare wholeheartedly for your right elbow although that same elbow has added, you might say, to my dimensions more than anything. I recall a particular night when the circumference was extended by a full inch, most of which accrued to me. You drank several pints of beer, retired to a hotel where you ordered a mixed grill which contained all the orthodox constituents from chop to liver, but which in this instance was enriched by several medallions of black and white pudding. You salivated and snorted like a starving hyena. The proprietor of the hotel was so taken by your appreciation that he added several further medallions of the puddings in question. Alas, because of their saline contents you consumed another half gallon of beer.
I just cannot forgive you for repeatedly indulging yourself in such a gluttonous fashion. You have made me ungainly and obese. Bad as this is the worst of all is that nobody cherishes me. You have never uttered a single word in praise of me or a word in my defence. There are no poems or songs about me or my equals. The only praise I ever received was when I accidentally came in the way of a kick at goal during a football game. Somebody shouted from the sideline, ‘Good arse!’ Beyond that nobody ever singled me out for approbation. I have no dignity. It’s been eroded over the years by your failure to keep me in shape. I once had innate dignity and when innate dignity is eroded there is no substitute. Acquired dignity is less sensitive.
I am often mildly irked by the veneration which is accorded to my female counterpart - it seems to be an object of immeasurable esteem as well as being a powerful source of titillation and infatuation. Men are frequently quite carried away by moderately attractive female posteriors and just as you slobber over your food so do the lecher and the philanderer slobber over the curvaceous sit-me-down of the graceful female. In fact I recall on occasion after you had emerged one morning from a newsagent’s in the metropolis, you were so attracted by the pair of bouncing female buttocks in front of you that you followed their proprietress blindly for over a mile until she disappeared through a doorway. Granted the female posterior is smooth as silk, eminently hand-cuppable and more capable of exciting the male onlooker than any other aspect of the female make-up. There is simply nothing to compete with it. Woe is poor me by comparison. Many a worshipful devotee will tell you that of all the world’s vistas the female fundament is the most surpassing whereas even the most chaste will not deny that, in all its unclad glory, it is the most intoxicating of prospects. But enough! I digress too much.
I have, for too long, succumbed to base matters. How can one be analogical when one descends to the very bottom! Despite my lowly position, however, I must not despair. I cannot draw myself up nor can I alter my situation. Yet I am strangely content. I do what is required of me and I believe I do it well. Little is seen of me and maybe that is just as well. All exposure has ever done for me has been to bring ridicule down upon me. I can still hear the derisive whoops from the day the seam of your trousers burst when you stopped to tie your shoelace as you searched for a Christmas turkey in the market place. You slunk home with your inadequate hands vainly trying to cover the exposed area which was the title bestowed upon me by your kind-hearted mother. I am, I must painfully conclude, an object of derision. I do not deserve to be, hairy though my lineaments may be and coarse my features, with a central situation which does little to enhance my overall appearance. If I were permitted to choose my epitaph it would read as follows:
Faithful down below he performed his duty.
No posterior deserved more to be raised aloft.
If I could leave my impression, my mark as it were, upon this paper I would be proud to do so, so that maybe one day a discerning soul might read my lines as the clairvoyant reads the palm and tell the world of the vilification to which I have been subjected and declare the true warmth, the true loveliness that I exude. If posteriors have a dream then mine would be to hold myself up to a mirror and ask:
Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Who is the fairest of us all?
To which the mirror would instantly reply:
Thou art, oh arse!
Remember, dear brain, that dreams sometimes come true. All you have to do is address yourself to moderation and unremitting exercise and I might be transformed into a posterior trim and shapely, which might be exhibited in public as a shining example of my kind.
Sincerely
Your Posterior