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A wart flew in during the night

I HAVE a wart.

Don’t ask me how or when. It just turned up. I looked down last month and there on the inner joint of the little finger of my right hand — was a wart.

How do they do that!

Do they fly in during the night, like miniature space ships? Or do they erupt like volcanoes while you’re in the lavatory, or the bath? Bluurp, and there it is — bloated as a tick but much more indestructible.

Everyone is being very kind but I know that, secretly, they are disgusted. I can see it in the people who shake my hand. Their fingers wrap around mine, they feel the wart, and something panicky happens in their eyes.

I’m not standing for it. The bloody thing is going if I have to chop my finger off.

That’s the other thing that’s amazing about warts. They turn up overnight but they hang around for years, like relatives waiting for the will to be read.

You can’t even embarrass them, much less get them to leave. If you could clone warts you could make engines out of them that would never break down.

I am embarrassed to tell you what I have tried every treatment known to the medical, arcane, homeopathic, and just plain pathetic worlds, and I still have my wart.

I have painted it with jollop from the pharmacy I have rubbed it with potatoes. I have slept with banana skins strapped to it (feeling really, really, silly) and I have soaked it in lemon juice. I still have the wart but I smell like lunch.

Actually there is one cure I haven’t tried, but I’m going to. Mark Twain, in Tom Sawyer, suggests warts will take fright and disappear if you bury a dead cat at the foot of a dead tree at the full moon.

There’s always a squashed pussy lying on one of the roads where I live. The next one will be on my shovel before you can say miaow.

I run the risk that the wart will stay, but my wife — who has already expressed concern about sleeping with a man wearing a banana skin on his finger — will leave. And the neighbours may move away, but I’m desperate.

And the trouble is you can’t trust the little sods (warts, not the neighbours). One today, two tomorrow, a whole family next week. If they were mice you could set traps!

Experience tells me I am going to live like this for three years or more. I will end up so desperate that I will treat it furtively in locked rooms by weeing on it, or sticking my finger up my bottom. But it won’t work and I’ll get warts on my bum , too!

Warts are one of God’s best jokes. He (or She) drives you to such a pitch of humiliated torment that you will behave like a complete dimwit for three years and then you’ll sit down to breakfast one morning — and it will have vanished!

Your first reaction is incredulity… am I looking at the right finger… am I awake?

Then stunned amazement… my God, it’s gone! It’s really gone!

Then panic, as you hunt through the depths of your muesli looking for something that resembles a ripe wart.

You’ll even retrace your steps and examine the sheets… the wash basin… the dog’s bowl. Nothing.

If it flew in through an open window, then it’s flown out again, while God giggles behind his hand.

Hang on, is that a wart I see on His (or Her) little finger?

Good!