I recently spent three weeks traveling around England and Scotland playing cricket with my club side. Long days on a tour bus meant we had little to do except play cards, eat, and sleep -- and as a group of guys does when not hampered by female dictatorship, we ate terribly. A lot of bad food mixed with some serious alcohol consumption conspired to provide predictable results. We were probably lucky the tour bus didn't have a toilet, because it would have been really, really messy.

A tradition in England when leaving a nightclub (which invariably close no later than 3am by local law I believe) is to seek out a curry house, which seems to be the English version of Souvlaki in Australia. As noble tourists, a few of us decided that this was a tradition we were required to follow.

So it happened on a wet British night at half past three that two of my friends and I sat down in a dark and seedy curry house. I've written before about my long love affair with spicy foods, so predictably I asked the waiter for the hottest thing he could muster. I asked him to make me cry.

He did. The curry arrived bubbling with what could have been pieces of Siamese kitten for all I knew; drunk out of my mind, I had unwittingly ordered a meal which would haunt me for the next fourty hours.

When we are in the field, I am a wicket-keeper, which is akin to being a catcher in baseball. I wear catching gloves and leg-guards and assume a crouching position to afford lateral movement after the ball is delivered.

Now, when I woke that morning, I felt painful cramps in my bowel -- but with a fair bit of experience with curry runs, I knew that I had to delay my first movement for as long as possible, because once you start you can't really stop.

We batted first and did well, so I didn't need to bat. I spent the afternoon sitting in the sun trying to distract myself from what I knew was going to be a painful ordeal. We ate at the innings break, but I stayed away from food because I didn't want to add substance to what was going to be quite substantial anyway.

I padded up to wicketkeep and as I squatted to fix my pads on, I felt a little tremble, foreshadowing the arrival of a very unwelcome guest. We play in white pants, and so the first thought in my mind was that if I had so much as a little loss of concentration, there would likely be some very visible evidence -- particularly with the amount of squatting that I have to do behind the stumps.

After about fifteen overs of this (that's roughly 90 squats), I knew that my time was limited. So I did what I had to. Head bowed, I jogged over to our captain and told him the sad news that I could no longer wicketkeep for the match because I was about to do my impression of a bursting dam of muddy water. He wasn't happy, but upon seeing the conviction in my eyes, realized that there was no other option than to bring in the second string wicketkeeper.

Two panic-filled minutes later, I entered the clubroom toilets. Now I have a thing about public toilets. I'll still use them if they are not in good condition, but I treasure those moments when I come across something particularly special. And this was. Gleaming white tiles, stalls that had floor-to-ceiling walls and doors, and a standard, thick, quilted roll of toilet paper. My pads were strewn all over the floor as I attempted to prepare myself to unleash.

As I sat down, I lost control. Never have I felt so relieved and at the same time so fearful of what I knew would happen when the oxygen in the room fueled the nerves in my rectum which were conspiring to let me know all about that one hot curry.

The sound was tremendous. I was thinking Niagara Falls, only more powerful. By this stage I had dexterously lifted my ass off the seat in order to avoid the possibility of back-splash. I felt what seemed like three to four litres of pure acidic bile spray out of my anus like a high-pressure hose. This was par for the course for a curry crap, so I was not worried as much as feeling like I'd come home.

Unfortunately, that was when I started really feeling the sting. For a few seconds I really thought that something may have ignited the noxious gases underneath me and absolutely obliterated my lower bowel. There were cramps, there was definitely "ring-sting", and there was a dull ache in my head from all the blood concentrating there while I was trying to get everything out.

One courtesy flush later, I tried again. More liquid, although this time it was in smaller spurts and not one huge one. The smell by this stage was overpowering, and I could feel heat coming back up at me from the bowl.

It was time to take on the chunks.

They came out slowly at first, and I swear they looked exactly the same as the meat I ate, undigested. They were fairly large in comparison to my usual efforts, and slid out as if they were very lubricated. The only defining factor about them was that for some reason they were cool, and seemed to soothe the pain which was still molesting my ass.

Clean-up was fairly easy, but I knew that I would be back soon. I wandered out into our dressing-room, borrowed a few magazines and somebody's discman, checked the score, and settled back in for what was shaping to be the biggest innings of my tour.

-- Tollstrup

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