Prior to going to the Tower of London with my mother, I spent 3 hours in hospital being taught how to self irrigate my stoma …

That involves sticking a cone end into your hole and letting a litre of water flow in, and then being prepared for the same litre, plus ‘solids’ to come rushing out. In practice it kinda rushes out in bursts, rather than all at once. I have to pre attach a poop shute to myself so that it doesn’t pebbledash the wall in front of me, and goes into the bog instead.

Obviously the idea is that because I’ve done this, nothing then comes out until you do the procedure again 24 hours later in your bathroom. In practice, nothing did come out into my ‘bag’ for about 12 hours, but then did. I suppose I wasn’t properly flushed after the first go yesterday, then.

As i type I’m doing it again, being careful not to drop this phone into the bog. Whilst IPhones are now waterproof, you still don’t want to get them covered in shite, if avoidable…

Thanks Mum, for coming down, and thanks Dad for delivering her and collecting her. I think that arrangement was probably sensible as my Mum doesn’t have any inbuilt sense of direction, so isn’t guaranteed to end up where she is supposed to go.

She does have other qualities though, which compensate.

And also the Italian barman on the 69th floor of The Shard tried to proposition her. There’s got to be a lot of inappropriate jokes that could accompany that occurrence, but I’m not going to make any of them – at least not in this diary.