There are terms of endearment at large within the small group to which myself and the Professor belong. For instance, during a recent entente cordiale between himself and the Professor, Alec Cosgrave was branded Maxwell because of his pretension to and, in many instances, his achievement of smartness. Our other regular compañero, Matt Butler, has this long time affectionately been known as Two Ducks, on account of his eyes being bigger than his belly whenever we’re at the Yangtze Valley.

I am Howard because it is said of me that I cannot pass a sink without washing my hands. The reference is, of course, to the billionaire industrialist, Howard Hughes. The fact of the matter is that I like having clean hands, not only from the point of view of utility and personal comfort, but, since it is with my hands that I interface with the world most directly, as a token of respect to my fellow man. It is another thing altogether whether my fellow man is worthy of such respect.

There’s a biscuit barrel in the canteen at work. There are many like it, I’m sure, all over the country. You go for your tea or your coffee and if you fancy a nibble you rummage around in the barrel for a digestive, a fig roll or a custard cream. I don’t venture into the biscuit barrel. Nor do I touch the finger food in pubs, and you’ll never see me reaching into a communal crisp bowl at parties. It’s not that I don’t like biscuits, or cocktail sausages, or crisps, it’s just that I’m deeply uninterested in absorbing any of the microorganic evil that I know is hopping off these tasty treats.

The crux of my problem is that there’s not a whole lot of hand washing going on in the gents’. I watch my brothers zip up and walk away from the urinal, I see them look in the mirror, perform some small token of titivation and breeze through the door. I don’t know directly what things are like in the ladies’, but anecdotal evidence suggests that they’re not much better. You’d think by now my amazement would have abated, but it hasn’t. There’s a certain select bar in town that I no longer drink in since, to my horror, I witnessed one of the barmen perform the above ritual from the starting point of a locked cubicle; and he’s not the exception you’d like to imagine him.

Before I hear any protest let me assure you that the little routine you do to assuage whatever guilt it is you feel when someone in front of you in the gents’ is up to his wrists in suds, that twiddling of the fingertips under the cold tap, does not qualify as washing your hands. Washing requires the application of soap. Anything else is wetting, rinsing or moistening. I find it strange that during discussions of this topic everyone, to a man, will agree with this position; so that I begin to wonder how those few who aren’t washing their hands seem to get around so much. Frankly, I don’t know who to believe anymore. If we should ever meet, see how long it takes me to excuse myself after I’ve shaken your paw; and try not to be insulted, it’s just that I don’t trust you.

Naturally the Professor in this regard is above suspicion. And yet he does not fully concur with my aversion to hand-borne pathogens. In a recent epistle he outlined for me how the moist openings in the head were the greater cause for concern.

“It is my solemn conviction that we were very lucky during the SARS scare that the virus failed to reach our shores. Given the rate at which the indigenous Paddy refuses to cover his mouth and nose when coughing and sneezing, we’d have been extinct before Christmas. Just this morning I saw a man, and this is no word of a lie, tipping his head back so that he could sneeze up into the air, giving that extra bit of lift needed to facilitate the spread of airborne death. And I wouldn’t mind only it made absolutely no sense from his point of view, it being a considerably more difficult manoeuvre than turning his head to one side, firing at the ground or simply doing nothing and allowing the ejectamenta shoot out ahead of him.

“And if they’re not communicating their personal filth by failing to erect barriers against it, they’re deliberately propelling it into our midst through the fine art of spitting. We’re great spitters, the Irish; practice makes perfect. And we’re clearly proud of it, since we don’t appear to care who’s looking—or listening. That’s the thing that really gets me, the manly music that seems to make the whole thing worthwhile to the seasoned hawker, that satisfying reverse-suck sound of the lightning quick blockage and release, as the poisonous payload squeezes at high speed through the tightened rictus of expulsion and breaks free into the wide world. They’d never waste a decent egestion by consigning it to a handkerchief. The next time you’re in a waiting room or on a bus, pay attention. They’ll spend any amount of time and energy snuffling back mucus, they’ll offend any sensitive ear, they’ll even risk choking to death before they’ll use a tissue, so keen are they to save their tacky ordnance, in order that out of doors it can be expelled in a more dynamic, ballistic fashion.

“I’m not well up on sport, but it has occurred to me that we might have a team in training for the Phlegm Olympics, or some other minority interest akin to that business the Yanks do with tobacco. Some morning, on my walk into work, I must examine for clues the glistening spots of viscid achievement that dot the pavement. It might be possible to determine if the events are purely ones of speed and distance, or if there are elements of artistic interpretation involved, points for consistency and mucilaginousness perhaps. Indeed it may even be that they are not all individual diciplines, which would leave us in the happy position of having Phlegmatic Pentathletes among us. Clearly it is a very obscure sport and the conclusion must be that it is an amateur one. If it were professional we’d be richer than Switzerland. It might even be the reason we’re known as the Emerald Isle.”