At stool in a semi-public gentlemen's lavatory in Oxford during the late 1980s, I happened to read a notice pinned to the cubicle door. "A regular user of these toilets is obviously suffering from anal bleeding. Would he please contact me at the first opportunity, as this could indicate a serious condition."
It had been signed by some doctor or other, and I read it with bemusement. I was a regular user of that lavatory, but I certainly hadn't been the one bleeding into it… How very gruesome, I thought, reaching complacently for the Andrex, to have blood coming out of one's arse.
It would have been about ten years and I suppose nearly 4,000 bowel movements later, when, after a bout of mysterious rectal pain, I looked down into the toilet bowl and saw that a bottle of claret appeared to have been emptied into it. The sight was mesmerising, almost beautiful, the red being so rich in colour; it also reminded me of that notice in Oxford.
I went to see my doctor and described what had happened, and the pain that had preceded it, which had now abated: "It was as though someone had shoved a broken bottle up my bum." "It's probably nothing more serious than piles," he said. "Do you want me to take a look?" I didn't want to appear too keen on this idea, so I said, "Well… it's up to you."
A minute later, I was face down on his couch with my boxers around my knees, and the doctor was saying, "Good God! You really do have piles. Do you think they're hereditary?"
My father had never told me he had piles. The subject had just never come up. But I knew he had varicose veins, and haemorrhoids are varicose veins of the bottom… I then recalled a tube of ointment that had lingered in our bathroom cabinet throughout my boyhood, and featured a bizarrely prolonged plastic nozzle. My father had had piles all right.
In fact many of my favourite people have had them, including Michael Foot, Lord Rosebery, Spike Milligan and TS Eliot, who, when asked for a piece of general advice by a young man, said, "Don't have piles." (If this list seems sexist, incidentally, let me formally acknowledge that women too have piles; it's just that you're much less likely to hear about it in their case.) I connect the condition with a certain type of old-fashioned Englishman, possibly not entirely fancifully. Piles are associated with a diet low in fibre, so a taste for English nursery food and an aversion to such modern, virtuous things as Ryvita Muesli Crunch and Tracker bars might promote them.
The male sufferer gains a sympathetic insight into menstruation, in that one's bum grapes expand and bleed in cyclical fashion, and the bleeding is both the best and the worst part. The best because the grapes then subside; the worst in that it can be very inconvenient. Once, realising that my piles had burst while I was in the back of a taxi, I had to sit on—and thereby ruin—a new blue linen jacket. (If the taxi driver hadn't been such a nice bloke, amiably chirruping away throughout the journey, I probably wouldn't have bothered.)
The most sanguinary event occurred when I was sitting on as bar stool in Dublin. Suddenly, it was soaking wet, and blood was dripping on to the terracotta tiled floor. I bolted for the luxury hotel in which I was staying (I was on a journalistic assignment), where I took four deep baths in succession. Each time the water turned dark red. I then spent two hours cleaning the blood off the bathroom floor, for fear of facing a murder charge. Later, I went out in clean clothes, and felt drawn towards a red-painted basement restaurant where I drank half a bottle of red wine and ate a rare steak in an attempt to rectify the balance.
One aspect of the condition is that you can't discuss it openly, so all sufferers are part of a secret sect. But I often think I can spot a chap with piles: he'll be riding a bike in an odd, skewed manner, or sitting in a pub using only the side of his arse and making crotchety remarks to his companions such as, "That's utter rubbish, and you know it."
Our patron saint must be the middle-aged Nobby, star of the Viz comic strip "Nobby's Piles." His whole life is one constant, doomed attempt to avoid aggravating his haemorrhoids, and he has his own entry on Wikipedia, explaining he "has been impaled on a church spire after a parachute jump, had his haemorrhoids stabbed by the rock pick of a mountain climber… and slid down a rusty metal banister after an ill-advised skateboard trick that went wrong." The entry helpfully lists the synonyms for "piles" or "haemorrhoids" in rhyming slang. "Emma Freuds" I'd heard of, but not "Badmintons" (Badminton horse trials) or "nauticals" (nautical miles) or "lever-arches" (lever arch files).
It's a relief to be able to speak openly about one's piles, but I shan't be starting an online support group. Piles ought really to remain a private penance. As such, I like to think, they provide a necessary corrective to the vacuous bonhomie by which we are all surrounded, and generally build character.
