Filth (For Grown-Ups Only!)

Consider filth. This is with reference to neither the police nor Newcastle United.

No, no. This is about real filth. The sort of filth that makes you sick and drives your Mum, or wife, to wash your clothes whether you think it is needed or not.

Girlfriends don’t wash your clothes as a general rule. They will let you be yourself until the knot is firmly tied and then the change sweeps over you.

The other day there was an episode of ‘Mythbusters’ that brought all this bubbling, like a thick froth of suds, to the surface.

Within this episode, the part that I saw, they were examining the difference between how people wash their hands post toilet event.

They carried out an experiment wherein they took hand samples with swabs following three different ‘techniques’:

The first one was where people pretended to wash their hands but walked out still ‘dry’.

The second was where people just rinsed their hands under running water, and,

The third was where people actually washed their hands properly with soap and water.

The samples were then placed on soy agar and incubated overnight.

There was a marked difference between the samples in that the people who failed completely to wash their hands had an agar covered in microbial activity. Whether the microbes were harmless or not was not investigated. The people who only used water showed spotty agar and those who washed properly had clean agar. Clearly (and obviously) the ‘soapy’ people came out the purist in terms of microbes.

But.

What wasn’t made clear was if the microbes were already on the hands prior to using the toilet. Might it not be that the hands were less than pure prior to carrying out one’s personal issues?

Consider this.

Money.

Money is filthy. The last person to hold that coin or note might have been infected with some dire disease known only to the ‘Centre for Disease Control’. Or it might have been held by someone who has just been to the toilet and failed to wash their hands. Or it might easily have been a pork salesman or purveyor of some equally filthy material.

Perhaps the coin was filthy because it had been dropped in doggy poos on the pavement/sidewalk/five-foot way. Who knows where that money has been.

Speaking of doggy poos—what about doggy? They like, do they not, to roll around on sundry surfaces like grass. Grass that could easily contain other doggy poos.

Or pavements. They might like to lie down on the pavement while you chat with your friends/neighbours/family. Pavements are well known to be a hard surface covered in a thin patina of dog/bird/cat poo, piss, vomit, spit and sundry other germ breeding bodily secretions from a variety of germ laden sources.

Then you stroke doggy. Doggies, I am reliably informed by those who know such things, like to be stroked. They do not, it appears, like to be cuddled but will tolerate it for short periods.

So you handle money and doggies. Never mind cats. We shall not mention cats who are an abundant source of filth.

Dogs and cats like to lick themselves clean. This licking includes their defecation areas; then they lick your face. Cute, eh?

What else do you handle during the course of the average day? Door handles. Door handles are gripped by everyone. Supermarket trolley handles. These are known to be one of the filthiest items in creation. Small children are known to be carried in supermarket trolleys; they will, on occasion, lean forward and suck at the handle—especially if they are teething, and swap one set of germs for another.

Then you go to the toilet. Men, generally speaking, tend to stand up, unzip, reach in and fumble around until they find ‘it’ then stretch it out past the zip and to make it look longer for the benefit of the person in the next stall. This requires quite a firm grip using both finger and thumb.

The fingers and thumbs are the primary gripping tool for holding money and supermarket trolley handles. Possibly, even, for stroking dogs and cats.

Shake off the drops and put the unclean object back in the trousers, zip up and head for the taps where we might, or might not, cleanse our fingers before reuniting with wife or girlfriend.

Allowing for a reasonable microbial incubation time we may now enquire of our wives or girlfriends if they should care to involve themselves in some sort of intimacy involving oral manipulation.

After all, our hands are clean.

Aren’t they?