On the whole, the stranger search phrases people are using when they stumble into my belly button fall into the following categories…

Piercing

Now this isn’t altogether odd; I did write about Jessica Collins and her horrendous belly button piercing accident. The traffic is dying-off now, but for a while I was getting people searching on all sorts of belly button jewellery and piercing related phrases. The best ones are in the form of questions…

“How long will it take for belly piercing to close up after taken out?”

“Can I do cheer after getting my belly button pierced?”

Well, I am not really equipped to answer this sort of thing, but maybe I will seek out some advice on this sort of thing for the odd wayward web-searcher the drifts by this way.

Lumps & Smells

A lot of people seem concerned about the physical well-being of their belly buttons. I get a lot of visitors searching for things like…

“lump in my belly button”

“belly button smell”

“bits in my belly button”

“red lump in belly button”

“my belly button is red”

These people will be having less luck than the people searching for information about piercing. I am no doctor and shouldn’t even try to give medical advice, but I do have this to say:

If you at all worried about a medical problem, see a doctor, don’t use the internet. The internet is a great place to develop hypochondria and is full of people with opinions but no medical background. Go and see your GP or at least phone NHS Direct.

Odd Questions & Statements

Who goes to Google and searches for “pictures of my wife’s navel?”, or “what does belly button look like?” (this might actually be aliens planning their invasion on Google)? The slightly random questions are one thing, but the statements are better; here are some of the more interesting ones…

“My son loves my belly button”

“I love my enormous pregnant belly”

“My wife has an outie belly button”

“I have a belly button t-shirt”

That’s nice for you all. What do you actually want? I can actually see some of the troubles search engines have in returning relevant results to some people.

Last, and by no means least, is this fascinating little gem…

“he always compares my navel”

This is so tantalising; what does he compare it to? Come back, tell us, we need to know!

Tickling

This is my favourite. It isn’t weird, it isn’t gross, it isn’t puzzling, it is just a little but of harmlessness. People seem fascinated by navel tickling, and who can blame them? Here are a few of the great searches people have been landing here from…

“belly button tickling”

“navel tickling”

“belly button tickling stories”

“bellybutton tickling pictures”

“exposed belly button tickle”

“he tickles my navel”

The last one almost made it into the Odd Questions & Statements section above, and I do wonder if it is the same person that has a man that compares their belly button. You have to love the ticklers.

I know, I know, where is the latest fluff report? I have a not insubstantial pile of belly button fluff from the last few months and you want details. I have yet to decide how to process it; do I photograph it en-masse or do I go all the way and photograph each piece? I am thinking en-masse (maybe a selection of the more interesting pieces of lint on their own as well). Also, I am not near a camera today, so have a little patience.

Don’t worry eager readers (not that I actually have any), I have been diligently collecting my belly button fluff all this time; more on that later though, I want to explain my absence and also today’s events.

Firstly: Where have I been?

Well, as mentioned in the last entry, I was coughing a lot and had a friend dying in hospital. The cough turned into a six-week chest infection and my friend is dead. The cough was mostly clearing up by the time he died, but it was still vicious enough to preclude me from being one of his pall-bearers; the last thing I wanted was to have a coughing fit and drop him on his final journey.

So, Ian Slade is dead. I won’t tell you how great he was or what he did or liked; for those that didn’t know him, it would be meaningless, and those that did know him will not need telling. Needless to say, he will be missed and his death caused me great sadness and distraction.

At around the time all this was happening, my company was bought out by a large London digital agency. I have gone from a large cog in a small machine, to a small cog in a large mechanical lanscape-dominating edifice. This has taken a lot of getting used to and the integration has been challenging at times. On top of this, business is booming and I have more work than ever.

Recently my wife has developed all the classic symptoms of meningitis. The doctors were of the opinion that the symptoms were coming on too slowly for meningitis and sent her home. She didn’t die, which was a massive relief, but I did spend a lot of time worrying.

So that is my life in a nut-shell for the last three months; all except for today that is.

Secondly: Today I watched a man drown.

Some work colleagues and I went to the pub for lunch down on the quay in Exeter; this turned out to be an experience (I would say “mistake” but that would trivialize the lessons learned and their cost). We arrived to find a man having a bit of an argument with the publican; it wasn’t overly heated as such, but there were threats of beatings being casually tossed around by both parties and the man was rather drunk. We sat outside and observed for a while and the publican obviously called the police, as they turned up after a while. They spoke to the man for a while and I went to order food. When I came out of the pub, the man (I wish I could give him a name) was in the river and swimming. Now, before anyone calls police brutality, he dived in of his own accord apparently.

This is where is got ugly. The man stopped swimming fairly quickly and then stopped raising his head for air. People started wondering if he was drowning (he was rather drunk after all) but I think most thought he was faking it to get the coppers to jump in after him (myself included). Then he sank.

People were starting to realise that something was wrong at this point and a few people started to react (myself not included), including one of my work colleagues. There were four members of the public in the water looking for him before one of the watching police officers joined the rescue effort. Unfortunately the water was five yards deep (according to the police divers that turned up later) and visibility was around two-feet in the murky depths of the Exe.

After ten or fifteen minutes, people started to give up; there were professional rescue divers arriving on scene and he was most-likely dead by then anyway.

Then our lunch arrived.

I have spent most of the afternoon dwelling on this: I sat and watched a man drown today.

At first I was paralysed by indecision (is he faking it or is he really in trouble?), then my mind started making excuses: he really is faking and he will come up for air at any moment; the police will rescue him; being fat and unfit makes me a poorer choice for this by far than most other people here; there are already people helping, they will drag him to the surface any moment now; it is too late now, surely?

However, the more time went by, the more I regretted not being the one that said “fuck it” and just jumped in. All afternoon I have been asking myself: would he be alive now if I had acted, if I had not dithered? Those that tried, while they failed to rescue him, can at least say they tried.

For a while I was angry; angry at the drunken fool for going for a swim, angry at myself for not doing anything, angry at the police for just watching. The anger that endures though is the anger at those people that were busy lamenting the fact that no-one was helping him while doing nothing themselves.

I have learned some valuable lessons today. Unfortunately it took a man’s life to teach them.

Update: The BBC have covered the story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/7399083.stm

]]> http://www.mynavel.co.uk/2008-05-13/my-absence-and-a-drowned-man-at-exeter-quay/feed/ http://www.mynavel.co.uk/2008-02-04/belly-button-fluff-and-lazy-photography/ http://www.mynavel.co.uk/2008-02-04/belly-button-fluff-and-lazy-photography/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:29:06 +0000 admin http://www.mynavel.co.uk/2008-02-04/belly-button-fluff-and-lazy-photography/ I have a week’s backlog of belly button fluff and little time to photograph it, so I cheated…

Wednesday’s fluff was a nice shade of red as I was wearing a terracotta t-shirt.

Friday’s belly button was bereft of fluff.

I have been doing this for a month now, so what does a month’s accumulation of belly button fluff look like? Well, something like this…

Please note that Saturday’s and Sunday’s belly button fluff are not included in this image as these were not harvested in the first month.

I do apologise for not coming up with an individual, detailed image of each day’s lint, but I have been rather ill (coughing and snotting mostly) and my dying friend is occupying my mind a lot.

I think it is time to stop beating around the bush; I have been dancing around the whole online anonymity thing but what is the point? His name is Ian and he is dying of an inoperable brain tumor. There, that doesn’t really narrow it down but at least I can use his name.

He has been moved to a hospice to die and seems to be doing so rather quickly. Over the last week his speech and motor-skills have deteriorated rapidly. I don’t think he is much longer for this world.

This picture was taken by kellyandapril on Flickr.

Pregnant bellies are great and well worth cuddling.

I am a little behind on the photographs at the moment. Take comfort in the fact that all lint deposits are being catalogued and kept separated for image capture.

We took our son to Pizza Hut tonight. I know this isn’t a sign of great parenting, but the little blighter is often somewhat pooped after being picked up from nursery and tends to fall apart when we drive him home and then cook something; he needs feeding there and then really. So, once a week we take him out to dinner.

Anyway, justifications of parenting decisions aside, our Pizza turned up one slick short and the waitress admitted that someone had dropped a slice on the floor. She did say though that there was another on the way and to tuck into this one while we waited; so we did.

Then the replacement turned up; it was the same size as the other and both were left on our table. To be honest we were expecting a tiny pizza to replace the one lost slice, not a full medium pizza. We essentially got two for the price of one - needless to say we couldn’t eat all this pizza so I have lunch for tomorrow.

It seems I didn’t manage to post Belly Button of the Week last week, so to make up for this I will post two this week. Without further ado, here is Belly Button of the Week 4…

This is a creative common image from Flickr, as taken by elastic.

Then I got ill. I don’t know what it is but there is nasty cough associated with it as well a flu-like symptoms. So this is why I haven’t been very active this week.

Anyway you don’t want to know about me and my life, you want to know about my belly button fluff.

I have discovered that tucking one’s t-shirt in definitely has a good impact on navel lint production. On Monday I produced this…

This is a not insubstantial lump of belly button fluff. Blue t-shirt, blue lint, no surprises.

On Tuesday I produced this…

A monster bit of belly button fluff. Brown t-shirt, brown lint, huge fluff, Measuring in at a tremendous 13mm I am very proud of Tuesday’s navel lint.

On Wednesday I produced this…

Not huge, but measuring in at a respectable 10mm.  The t-shirt I wore on Thursday was a kind of khaki colour - a bit brown, a bit grey and a bit green. This picture doesn’t really get the colour across well, but rest assured the colour does match the t-shirt to some extent. This one had a surprising amount of belly hair threaded through it - I usually get one noticeable hair a day, this one was riddled with the stuff.

On Friday I produced this…

Grey t-shirt, grey fluff again - I am not really subscribing to this “all fluff is blue-grey” theory that abounds on the web. Friday’s specimen of belly button fluff measures in at a monstrous 14mm. Wow!

On Saturday my belly button produced this…

Another khaki t-shirt, more khaki fluff. Not enormous and quite hairy again. This little lump of belly button fluff was nearly lost to the dust and fluff of the floor. I had a few quick peeks at my navel during the day to see if the accumulations were proceeding as planned, and it was. Then, near bed-time I went to remove and photograph the day’s lint accretion only to find it was not there. Gasp! I cast around in a mild state of panic and found it on my belt - it had obviously only fallen out fairly recently but this is the proof I needed to say with confidence that sometimes “lint is lost”. I need to be more vigilant about protecting my belly button fluff.

Today (Sunday) I didn’t tuck my t-shirt in and the accretion is tiny to say the least. If there is anything worth showing, I will share the photo tomorrow.

On a slightly different note, I visited my dying friend in hospital again today. He had a seizure earlier that day and was almost incapable of speech. He is usually very tired after one of these so I didn’t stay long but we did spend a little while holding hands. It isn’t really a very British thing to do, or very manly either, but it was one of those moments where a certain understanding passed between us. It was the first time my strong facade broke in front of him and my eyes welled up as we held eye contact. Some people have questioned whether he understands that he is dying, I think he knows all too well - I could see it in his eyes.

No sleep for me tonight.

I wore a white t-shirt yesterday too. The size of this sample isn’t great but on a dark background, you can see it is rather pale…

It is harder to see in these pictures, but there are a few small red fibres. This definitely needs further investigation.

Woo.

Edit: A question occurred to me while I was out and about today: Do deaf people with Tourette’s Syndrome spontaneously sign rude words?

However, I seem to have discovered that tucking one’s t-shirt in seems to hasten lint gathering compared to having a free and loose top. The evening’s deposit was not insubstantial as I thought it might be. There was also a slightly pleasing surprise in that I was wearing a white t-shirt and the fluff had a distinctly pale cast as you can see…

Note the one red thread coiled up to the left of the lint. I am beginning to wonder if all fluff has one red fibre, but only time will tell on that one.

I took a picture on a darker background (the cover of a copy of the New Scientist actually) so the lightness of the fibres becomes more apparent.

The reason this colouration rather pleased me is that I have read in all sorts of places that belly button fluff is always a bluey-grey colour.  Graham Barker’s was always red despite rarely wearing red clothes. I am somewhat pleased that there seems to be a logic to the colour of my belly button’s linty balls.

I love the innie/outie love. This image was taken by majorbonnet on Flickr. A brilliant and imaginative image.

We gave them a grilling on how they push religion on the kids and while we have reservations about them indoctrinating our child, it could be a lot worse.

I was wearing my new black jumper yesterday, the one that gave me lint overload from my navel the first time I wore it. However, this time it wasn’t so productive; maybe I had a very sedentary day compared to last time, or maybe it has already lost most of its excess fluff or maybe I had a lump fall out.

This is the sum total of the day’s production…

It is quite a disappointing bit of navel lint really. Like the day before though, there is one red fibre threaded though this little bit of belly button fluff.

I have been fairly concerned about losing bits of belly button fluff of late; I don’t know what I can do about it though. Some kind of belly button girdle will only serve to hinder the fluff’s entrance into my navel. I can only think that more regular progress checks to keep a better track on how the lint is accumulating; this way I should know if there is a loss of belly button fluff during the day.