What am I made of?

One night this week my lady caught me doing something. Something I would have continued to do if someone hadn’t walked back into the room.

It was after 11pm. Relaxed in the sitting room, I had eaten well and with just Laura Tobin telling me about tomorrow’s weather on the Television for company for several minutes, and the angle poised lamp light, casting elongated shadows over the furniture, I half slouched down on the settee and it just felt right, you know how it is, to consider my own body.

On walking in on my situation at hand, Mrs. Tombs stuttered to a halt: “What on earth are you up to?!?”

When I explained what I was up to, she told me it would only end with me having to be taken to A&E because I had pulled my own spine out my hips, at which point I would have to look a doctor straight in the eye and say I did it as a result of the curiosity of if I could taste my own knee.
And the doctor would not fully believe that.

So I stopped, knowing she was right.

Earlier in the day I was out at a family party. Not for my family, you understand. I got talking to a man called Marvin. Apparently he is known as a very boring man in this family’s circles and I was, by virtue of unwittingly standing next to him, taking a boredom bullet for the relieved family. Which explained why no one came up to us for pretty much all of the afternoon as part of the customary mingling processes these occasions usually present – despite my watering eyes.

This was despite the fact I liked him because he reminded me of a man from the 1970’s. He was a collection of straw yellow shirt, brown flannel tie with brown tint spectacles and had a moustache from a documentary featuring a father of two teenage daughters who had recently got a management position at the local BETAMAX factory.

This kept me amused during his in depth discussion at me about Ordinance Survey map scales. At some stage during a binary description of his 2nd family holiday in Austria, I thought: I wonder what my knee tastes like? I should know this, it’s my knee! I have never touched my own knee with my lips, mores my shame! I mean, it is my body and I am a grown adult, able to do things with my body if I want to, like simply tasting my own knees. When I get home, I am absolutely going to aim to find out. There is no right minded reason why I should not know this.

And I will tell you, I am glad I experimented with my body that very night. Shambolically convexing, lilting and tilting like an upturned wood louse on the couch, trying to taste any one of its 3, 8, however many knees. I am not proud I was seen doing it, don’t get me wrong. No one should be seen trying to taste their knee. But I did manage a little strained lick, though. The tiniest touch before by leg sprang back from my face.

For those of you wondering what it tasted of?
Wrist.