The most disgusting blog you’ll read all day.

This week I farted in my Pilates
instructor’s face.

My bum was raised on a foam cylinder, my
shoulders on the floor with arms splayed either side of me, and my legs
horizontal up in the air. We were told to raise our arses off of the foam
cylinder by contracting our lower stomach muscles to propel ‘up’. Alessandro
made it look easy. It wasn’t.

He watched me for a moment, laughed, and
then came to assist.

The instructor stood at my raised legs,
holding on to my feet and helping me move ‘up’. Once, twice, three times, and then
he pushed me to lift higher with more force. As my legs went up and my stomach
muscles contracted, and I was exhaling and inhaling and translating, the
biggest- and loudest- flurry of air ever to have flurried anywhere in the
history of flurrying exited from my bottom, approximately six inches from his
nose.

Embarrassed doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Embarrassing doesn’t surmise with enough zeal the exact level of mortification,
humiliation and SHAME, that farting so purposefully in somebody’s face
provides.

I thought he was going to throw up, or
throw me out.

But you see, it isn’t my fault. It’s the
soup. The delicious, nutritious soup I have been eating of a lunchtime. The
soup with all the vegetables and beans and lentils and HOW CAN SOMETHING SO
GOOD FOR YOU TASTE SO DELICIOUS. I’m sure that goes against all the rules.

The first time I tried the soup, I ate the
whole thing- designed as it is for two, you don’t know an appetite until you
have to run around with somebody else’s kids all day. I had ten minutes between
finishing lunch and starting my shift, so I took a brisk walk around the block
with my colleague to take some air before being locked away for six hours.

Halfway round I could feel a rumble in the
depths of my bowels. YES I JUST SAID BOWELS. It was an ache, a sort of deep
yawn. Uh-oh, I thought. As we circled
back around to school I was breathing heavier, and by the time we reached
reception on the first floor I quietly whispered to my friend ‘Oh. I don’t feel
so well.’

I silently took the key to the downstairs
kids department that stays locked until regular school gets out and private
English school commences. I slipped in through the door and flicked on the
lights for the bathroom down there. Then, to make it look like nobody was
around, I turned out the lights in the corridor again. I didn’t want to get
interrupted.

I looked in the mirror. My face was pale
and covered with a thin veil of sweat that beaded in messy clumps above my
eyebrows. I gripped the sink and bent over slightly, breathing heavily. I
closed my eyes. You got this, I said
to myself. Just breathe.

I sat on the loo and waited. And OH DEAR
GAGA was it a good job I wasn’t in the public bathroom upstairs next to the
waiting area.

I think just about everything I had in me
was released into that toilet, in quick succession and followed by a splash-back
that meant I had to wipe both my bum and the cheeks when I was finished.

It was… cathartic?

Ten minutes, three flushes and a pep talk
in the mirror later, I returned upstairs. Colour was back in my cheeks and I
felt 10 pounds lighter than I did before.

“Are you okay?” my pregnant friend asked
me.

“I thought I was going to die in there,” I
replied. “I’m sure it isn’t natural that that soup can tear through one’s
system like that in less than the time it took to eat it in the first place.”

“Did you use the toilet brush?”

“Yeah. But it wasn’t liquidy- it was quite
solid. But is skidded on the way down and was so heavy it cracked the toilet
bowl. It was a good one- the kind your doctor tells you about.”

“Laura?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s gross.”

And so after a week on such soup I suppose
I had accumulated some air. And then there were muscle contractions and lifting
and squeezing and basically now I don’t know if I have to find a new Pilates
studio because I PRACTICALLY SHAT ON HIS FACE.

Hey- remember when I used to have dignity?

No.

Me neither.