The dil-dos and don'ts

Morning, here’s yesterday’s Sunday Times Column. And this weeks comes with some photographic evidence.

A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – Paige Nick
THE DIL-DOS AND DON’TS

You know how you can never find a pen when you need one? Well, a couple of weeks ago I spent the weekend at a guest house in Franschhoek, and at some point I found myself tearing around the suite looking for a pen. I scrabbled through all the drawers in the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen, and eventually pulled open a drawer in the lounge – and there, nestling between a Yellow pages and a pile of take-away menus, was a large purple dildo.

I know it’s a self-catering guest house, but this is ridiculous. Had a previous guest left it behind in the drawer? Had the cleaning ladies discovered it elsewhere in the apartment and placed it in the drawer for safekeeping? Or is this a unique, special service this guest house offers its clients? And does a turn-down and dildo service turn a four star hotel into a five-star hotel? Forget B&B, they could rename it a B&D.

Although surely if it was provided by management, the very least they could do is put it into a hermetically sealed plastic bag and stick the points of the packaging closed with a sticker, like they do to the loo roll. I remember when all hotels used to offer a bible in the bedside drawer, oh how times have changed.

The problem is that after I found it, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the other people who had stayed in my room before me, and the things that they might have done in it. Somehow before this discovery I had always been able to block out these thoughts, and just kidded myself into believing that I was the only person to have ever slipped between those King-sized sheets.

And thinking too much about anything is a real danger in life, unless you’re in politics. Ignorance really is bliss. That’s why we still go bowling or ice skating. As long as we don’t ever think about who might have hired those shoes before us, we should be okay. It’s no different with hotel beds and sausages; it’s best not to think too much about what goes into them.

Dildos do seem to have a funny way of popping up in unexpected places though. Recently when they were interviewing one of the local Boston Marathon runners in his home after the horrific Boston bombing, The BBC failed to notice the giant pink dildo in the background, on top of his refrigerator. Cue Cremora reference.
They even pop up in small town South Africa. Some years ago I was at a close friend’s wedding, in a beautiful old hotel out in the middle of the nowhere. At breakfast in the manor house the morning after the wedding, we were all gathered en mass nursing our hangovers over bacon, eggs and bloody Mary’s, when the hotel manager plonked a giant dildo down on the table in front of the mother of the bride, and informed her that one of the wedding guests had left it behind in their hotel room when they checked out earlier that morning. Clearly discretion wasn’t on the menu, but a big sausage was.

And in Franschhoek when I mentioned the dildo in the guesthouse saga to a friend, and the fact that it looked like it might have been previously loved (isn’t that what they call second hand cars?), she told me that an old boyfriend once whipped out a dildo during an intimate moment and when she asked him where it came from, he told her it had once belonged to an ex-girlfriend. There are just some things that should never be shared. I wanted to write down what she said to him at the time, but I was too scared to keep on looking for a pen, goodness knows what I might have found in the next drawer.