providing sexual pleasure for the women with whom he partook in ‘jiggy jiggy’. I never found such a female to verify the effects of the augmentation, but he was adamant it worked and claimed his older brother had taught him the technique. On the same trip in Laos, I was swimming in the Mekong, when I attracted the attention of an effeminate young man with painted fingernails. He was an odd chap, bullied by the other villagers, and he had taken to hanging around with backpackers. I felt a little uncomfortable in his company but a few days later he again found me swimming and we chatted politely as I dried myself and sipped warm Beer Laos. The lad had strange scarring down
the front of his neck and I asked him what had happened. “Knife,” he told me, “cut with knife.” “Shit, that’s terrible. Who?” I imagined the village boys going too far with this strange specimen. “No. I cut. I cut this,” he ran his fingers down my own throat, hovering over the laryngeal prominence, which bobbed as I swallowed. “I cut this, I don’t like it.” The guy had tried to cut out his own Adam’s Apple. He told me, wrongly, that women don’t have Adam’s Apples. Now that’s extreme DIY, and where might it end? Will women be filling balloons with silicon gel before asking their best friends to get creative with a scalpel? Or maybe front room kidney transplants by your mate Gareth who has a very sharp Stanley knife? So although DIY may come naturally to you, and you may laugh in the face of an unmounted shelf, just be aware that there limits. Being able to paint a wall doesn’t make a proficient surgeon; a dab hand with a drill isn’t necessarily a dentist. Go too far and you could end up with horrible scarring and a strange lump below your bell end. ■ For more Dan Murdoch go to theothersidemag.co.uk