ENGLAND: 3
Spend time in Norwich hanging out with old mates and working with a cowboy builder from Wales called Brett. No, he doesn’t specialise in building cowboys…
Richard Lewis (my old house-mate) is the only person I’ve ever met whose poo spontaneously combusts. He’s come back from queer pagan camp all inspired to go and be a high class whore in Brighton. I tell him he could go to California where they’ll pay him extra just for being English. Richard Lewis is spectacularly English. I do know some prize quirky people.
I’d ended up living in Richard’s garden after coming back from the international school in Norway and the Mozambique disaster. (My own personal disaster as well as theirs. Disaster all round in fact.)
I’d come to visit Helen B at her cottage and a friend of hers, also called Richard was visiting too.
Helen had gone out, Richard turned up, we get on well and gacked out on ice cream. We ended up stoned in the bender in the garden. He said if I built him a summerhouse in his garden I could live in it for free. This seemed like a good deal. I went back to Norwich and between us we designed the Summer House. It was seven sided, made of found stuff; old floor joists mostly, with a roof made of sycamore stems attached at the centre to an old bicycle wheel with white blankets and then a cheapo tarpaulin slung across the top. It cost fifty quid in materials to build and I lived in it for a year and a half. It was my funky little garden shack. Fuck nose what I was doing living in suburbia though. Like John Cleese’s Dead Parrot, I spent a lot of time pining for the fjords.
Richard was lots of things I’m not. He was very intellectually articulate, he was a student, and therefore he knew everything and was always right. He was gay (still is I expect) and was a completely untidy bastard to live with. (I’m glad my bedroom was outside.) We also had lots in common – we are both good at being miserable for example, and we did like lots of the same things.
Over time, we grew to understand how to deal with each other better. He taught me how to talk through problems with him instead of me just stomping off in a sulk. He taught me to appreciate the art of cooking and the beauty in simple vegetables.
He’s been a great person to know. One time the badly designed toilet system broke down completely. The ‘shit mincer’ which carried macerated poo horizontally across the waste pipe upstairs to the down-flow pipe outside had given up its gravitationally difficult job. This pipe connected directly to the waste pipe on the kitchen sink, so every time the toilet was flushed, the kitchen would stink of shit (laaarvely). When it finally broke down completely we made a box with a toilet seat on it equipped it with a bucket lined with newspaper underneath for poo and straw/sawdust (to absorb smellyness) and a large container for piss. It got dubbed ‘The Fabulous Toilet Of Joy’ which we wrote on the lid with sparkly silver Fablon.
It worked very well; the piss was diluted and fed the garden plants and the poo was stored in a large broken ex-deep freezer. The insulation works very well in keeping everything warm so that it breaks down and turns back into good dirt. This is what people have done for centuries, possibly millennia all over the world. Without the aid of broken freezers of course.
It’s only our rat-racing world today that makes us think that chucking it into the sea and our drinking water system and then blasting the water with chlorine is a better idea. Wrong.
Richard went away for a week in the Summer and it was particularly hot – the whole lot went critical; a nasty mess of burning plastic smoke and flaming poo. Oops. I feel sorry for whichever poor neighbour made the discovery.
Richard Terry 