I’ll never forget where I was in the summer of 1998 as Scotland participated in the football World Cup: I was busy shitting myself to death. That’s a memory that tends to stick.

Now, if I were to equate the horrendous gastric issues my 18-year-old self suffered that summer with the horrors of war that my grandfathers faced at a similar age, then it would paint me in a very poor light indeed, so please look away now because that’s exactly what I’m about to do in the next two paragraphs.

Before you judge me, just think about it for a moment, alright? Did my grandfathers take a bullet? No. Did they have dysentery? No. Did they violently shit themselves in-front of their mates – many, many times – during a lads’ holiday to Magaluf? No. No, they didn’t. Quite frankly, they don’t know they’re born. Well, they don’t know anything at all, really, because they’re dead. But you get my point.

I mean, okay, okay, yes, yes: Hitler; war; mass genocide; being locked in a perpetual state of dread and terror; seeing friends die; having half the male population of your town wiped out; a world on the brink of Nazi enslavement, yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah. But did their giggling mates put their shitted pants on a stick and then fling them out the window? DID THEY FUCK!

The first lads’ holiday abroad is supposed to be filled with clumsy, meaningless sex, or at least the endless and pathetic pursuit of it. It’s supposed to be about drinking until you’ve got less of a grasp on time and reality than the dude from Memento; about narrowly avoiding being evicted from your hotel for pissing in the pool or scanting the manager. And it’s most definitely about childish intra-group pranks ranging from the dangerous to the borderline homo-erotic.

I was denied all of this, having bought the business end of a disease-ridden chicken-and-egg salad on the very first day of the holiday. A little tip for all you first-time travellers out there: if you’re lucky enough to avoid Covid, don’t go and ruin things by selecting as your maiden meal the combo voted: ‘Most Likely to Be Infested with Salmonella’. Because I ran that gauntlet and lost. I guess you could say I tripped over at the starting line, covered in my own fetid, liquid excrement.

Waking up on day two, after a hefty drinking session, I thought I was in the grip of nothing more bothersome than a hangover. I think it was somewhere between the fifteenth and sixteenth violent spew-poo (arse on toilet seat, head in bucket) that it dawned on me I was in the grip of something far worse. There were little hints everywhere. For instance, your brain usually gives your body ample warning of an impending eruption from Mount Ve-Poo-sius. Typically, you get anywhere between five and thirty-five minutes to find a toilet. When you’ve got salmonella, however, that message arrives by email rather than post, with the warning, more often than not, arriving in tandem with the shit itself. It’s the superpower nobody wanted: the power to summon diarrhoea with your mind.

Farts, of course, cease to exist; a dead concept; a literal blast from the past. You can’t risk them now. They lurk in your intestines, whispering falsehoods in your gut, but you must never listen to them. Not that it matters all that much anyway, because the decision is out of your hands – or anus, if you like. The dial on your arse has been turned from MANUAL to AUTOMATIC, and jammed in place. Your sphincter will spend many weeks propelling curried slurry from your arsehole with the speed of a pro-tennis serve, both when you least expect it, and also exactly when you expect it. All the time, in other words. Sometimes it feels like a malevolent elf is camped inside your rectum firing a staple gun out your bumhole.

On day three I went to hospital, a malnourished, raw-arsed wreck. I was no longer a man: merely a conduit through which myriad foul hues of excrement ripped and splashed their way into the world. A sip of water could see me stuck on the toilet bowl for twenty minutes. Mind you, not taking a sip of water could do that, too. Looking at water could do it. To make sure I stayed hydrated and, well, generally alive, I was hooked up to an IV drip, which was connected to what looked like a mobile hat-stand. I had to wheel it with me everywhere I went, even to the bathroom.

Outside, the hot Balearic sun beat down upon my room’s balcony. On it there were two chairs and a small table, upon which was perched a glass ashtray. It must be for visitors, I thought. I know the Spanish are quite liberal and lackadaisical when it comes to lifestyle matters, but even they wouldn’t let ill people smoke inside a hospital… would they? I wheeled my hat-stand into the corridor and aimed a croaky ‘Excuse-me’ at the retreating back of a doctor, who turned casually to face me.

‘Erm, there’s an ashtray on my balcony. Can I… smoke here?’ I asked, apologetically.

‘Are you in here with something to do with your lungs?’

‘No.’

He shrugged. ‘Then smoke!’

He sauntered off down the corridor.

Excellent. I wondered if that would work with alcohol. ‘My liver is top-notch, doc, mind if I get battered in to a bottle of Buckfast while you’re X-Raying my leg?’

During times such as these it’s tempting to speak out loud that infamous provocation to the universe: ‘At least things can’t get any worse.’ But don’t ever do that. Because they can. And they will. And they invariably do. In my case, I was about to witness the marriage of two of my least favourite things: shitting myself to death, and football.

In my room were two beds, one toilet, and a wall-mounted TV with satellite reception. For the first day or so I was alone, free to sit outside burning my pale Scottish skin on the balcony while reading a book on the horrors of Belsen, which – while not exactly cheering me up – managed to take my mind off of my own suffering. I was quite content to be alone, as I often am. Misery, I can assure you, does not like company, especially when that misery springs from one of the yukkiest and most humiliating ailments known to man. But misery got company anyway. A man soon arrived to occupy the vacant bed. What could I do to stop him? This wasn’t a hotel. I couldn’t exactly complain to the manager. Now, this is where the universe started to play real dirty. It was bad enough that my holiday had been ruined; bad enough that my friends had blamed me for an ant infestation following my explosive and uncontrollable bouts of diarrhoea in the hotel room, and bad enough that I had to share my shameful suffering with another mortal soul, but it was horror incarnate that I had to share it with another man who was also suffering with salmonella. Allow me to refer you to back to the first sentence of this paragraph: two beds… one toilet.

What the fuck was this? Some horrific Spanish game-show? Were there hidden cameras in the room? ‘Place your bets at home, signore. Whicha one of these British bastardos isa gonna be the first one to shit themselves? Let’s find out, when we play another exciting round of: THE UNITED STING-DOM!‘.

Any time that man so much as repositioned his foot, twitched his torso, or raised an eyebrow, I was out of that bed and clattering towards the toilet like a, well, like a man who was in imminent danger of shitting his breeks. As I’ve already established, when you’re operating on a one-to-five-second warning system, you can’t afford to have the only toilet in your immediate vicinity bagsied by the bumhole of another. It was dog-eat-dog. It was dog-shit-on-dog. Dear reader? I shat myself an ungodly amount of times.

And still the universe wasn’t finished with me. The man’s name was Trevor. He hailed from somewhere in the north of England. He was a very nice man, actually. I really quite liked him. It wasn’t his fault we’d been forced to compete for the same precious resource. If there was one thing I would have changed about Trevor, though, one teeny, tiny, teensy wee thing, it would probably be his social class. Not because I consider myself above anyone else, or believe myself to occupy a high social strata, because neither of those things is true. But if Trevor had been upper middle-class or aristocratic there would have existed a favourable statistical likelihood that he wouldn’t have liked fucking football.

But he did like football. He bloody well loved football. And it was the World Cup. And Trevor wanted to watch every single fucking game – plus after-match analysis. It got to the stage where I very much looked forward to those twenty to thirty times a day when I was painfully slithering volcanic green shit out of my aching bumhole. It came as something of a relief, actually. Was I dead? Was that the game? Was I dead and in hell? Is it because I lied when I was 17?

Trevor left, and I was blissfully happy for a day or two. My friends made the long journey to the hospital to visit, and left me a sneaky joint to enjoy on my sunny balcony. I shared it with the German fella who took Trevor’s place. The new guy didn’t speak any English, so communicating was a challenge. He readily understood ‘Do you want to share this joint?’ but not much else. He was good at miming though. I felt a new kinship between us when he successfully mimed how much he’d love to execute the stray cats that were prowling the hospital grounds many floors below us. Lovely fella. He liked football, too, because of course he fucking did.

I was discharged from hospital on the second to last day of the holiday, just in time to shock my friends with my uncanny impersonation of someone who’d spent six months in Belsen. I really rocked that skeletal chic. Truth be told, I could do with a bit of salmonella these days, in lieu of an exercise program and sensible diet.

There was just enough time to return to the restaurant that had served me the shonky chicken-and-egg salad, this time armed with a video camera, wielded by one of my friends. When the waitress came round for our order, we all requested ‘the salmonella’. To our amusement, she said, ‘We don’t have that’, perhaps not realising the satirical direction the evening was taking due to our impenetrable Scottish brogues. I snapped back, ‘Well, you don’t have it on the menu, but I believe you offer it as a special.’ Our amusement turned to astonishment when – camera still rolling – having made our meaning clear, the waitress proceeded to confess that there had been a number of cases of salmonella among the staff, not just at her branch, but at quite a few of them in the vicinity. Her candour won me the sympathy of Thomas Cook, who months later agreed to refund the cost of my holiday even though they had no affiliation or connection with the restaurant in question (I’m obviously not going to name the restaurant here, but suffice to say it’s my friend Tom Brown’s favourite place to eat in Spain).

Our plane touched down on Scottish soil, and my distraught mother – who’d been calling the hospital every day, and had been close to flying out to be with me – was waiting at the airport. She rushed to hug me. I was surrounded by my friends. So I did what any son would do in those circumstances. I physically blocked her from hugging me, said, ‘Don’t even think about it,’ and then walked away scowling. I know that makes me look awful, but I’d already lost a stone-and-a-half and about a million tonnes of my insides. I didn’t feel like parting with what little scrap of manliness I still believed myself to possess. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my mother still brings that up to this day.

I was relieved to be going home. And do you know the first thing I did when I got there?

That’s right.

Not watch football.

And I’ve tried to keep it that way ever since.