Shit I hear.

I work on a vessel now, and some of the blokes here are so rough and tumble that you could never ever see them working a white collar job. These are the guys that are the mechanics and the brickies of this world – salts of the earth. No pretension, no bullshit.

Some people are just so unabashedly themselves, that I find it very amusing and often shocking when they open their mouths.

I've heard the guys onboard openly discuss the previous night's whoring – who paid what for whom – the way you or I might discuss a movie we watched together the night before. Hardly breakfast conversation. I find it hard to make the motions that cuts my food and brings my food to my mouth and makes my mouth chew my food and swallow my food, when there's a supernova of complete shock and surprise fizzling out the motor-skills part of my brain.

At a recent crew change, I bid farewell to one of the guys and asked him what he planned for his break thinking he might mention family, a holiday, or fishing.

“Fucked if I know, but this time tomorrow I'm gonna be up to my nuts in guts!”

Indeed.

Anyway, it was after one of the mechanics onboard summoned some help from a Malay guy and a Thai guy on the vessel with “Hey, can one of you useless black cunts come and give me a hand?”, and neither of them batted an eyelid and stepped forward to help, that I've been ruminating on some choice phrases I've heard over the years.

My friend Mick's Dad was a classic, and was responsible for such timeless lines as:

Holding aloft a glass of perfectly brewed stout, taking a draught, smacking his lips in pleasure and declaring the brew to be “black as a nigger's arsehole, and twice as dirty” (a good thing, apparently)

Or there was the time he found out that I had once dated Mick's new girlfriend, and wanted to know “What's it like to stir Darren's porridge?”

A classy gent, Mick's Dad was.

Once, I went to my parent's friend's house for a long and laborious Christmas BBQ full of talk of farming, and cattle, and cattle farming, and the farming that one might do should one be interested in cattle, when my parent's friend's daughter grabbed her mewling baby from the pram that was set near the prawn festooned table, hoisted her top, and shoved a nipple into the tyke's gob.

The boob was out before we could politely look away, and I heard my mother “oh my” and tut as she does. Anyway, breast feeding does not bother me – it's a healthy natural thing – but I do get self-conscious about not looking anywhere near the baby-proffered mammaries lest my gaze be taken as some perverted thing, and instead I tried looking around the garden for something to both capture my gaze and to free me from the boredom of the day.

Perhaps the cattle dogs were fucking on the lawn again?

No such luck.

So I'm gazing at the dried grass, wondering when we're going be able to politely leave, ignoring the suckling going on directly opposite me, when the baby coughs and splutters a little, then burps. Mother loudly exclaims: Ooh, did you get a bone in it?

I think I threw up my mouth a little.

This is no game!

"You go skipping and prancing through life, skipping through a field of dandelions. But what you don’t see is that on each dandelion is a bee, and on each bee is an ant, and the ant is biting the bee and the bee is biting the flower, and if that shocks you then I’m sorry."

Ah, the wisdom of Jack Handey...