My Word of The Year is Poo Jogger

Spycraft 101: change the routine, or face the consequences

I’m a bit all over the shop with the turn of the year; raw and thin and delicate to the touch, like a bowl of sourdough preparing to be punched. The social energy of the festive season makes for lots of connecting and chatting with friends and family - so wonderful, so enriching, and yet - trying to explain a complicated, ongoing illness can feel like taking a fragile thing out into a hot wind. It’s hard work to protect it, and a relief to retreat back inside.

I really believe that tough periods prune for growth. But amongst all the ‘intention setting’ and ‘words to live by’ around me, my 2025 continues along the same vein as my 2024; which ran at a click of the dial just past my capacity to manage. A blogger friend from the old days, once an Alaskan homesteader, now writes a Substack called The Snow Globe (recommended!) and on it she asked yesterday:

“How does a person balance the maintenance of life with any forward movement? I feel like I can only do one or the other. When I try to do anything interesting and new, all the daily tasks fall to pieces. And when I buckle down and get all the daily tasks done, forward movement just stagnates.”

How this struck home. Present immersion versus forward motion: the delicate dance of 2025.

However, no matter how tricky my new year felt, it was undoubtably better than the middle-aged lady- let’s call her Kath - from Double Bay who was likely not expecting to start the year as Australia newest Poo Jogger.

Look, it’s human. We’ve all been there - strong flat white, vigorous exercise and oops! there’s a coyote at the pass putting an extra zip into the trot for home - but Kath made the mistake of sticking to a daily routine; dropping trou reliably behind the hydrangea at #32. Any spy would tell Kath that changing the routine up is key, just in case #32 has a nannycam. There Kath is, caught for posterity in her fresh blue New Balance trainers - themselves likely a Xmas gift inspiring the ill-fated New Year’s fitness challenge. Kath wrote a cheque her body could not cash, and now her bottom is known from Toowoombah to Tamerama.

She’s not Australia’s first poo-jogger, our Kath, just the latest.

I keep track. It’s a little hobby of mine. We’ve had several poo-joggers in the news over the years, since a Walkley-deserving journo first coined the term for the dangerous meeting of CCTV and person caught short, including one called the Paddington Pooper, caught at eccentric businessperson Roxy Jacenko’s house. After the incident, Roxy dedicated a sponsored Instagram post to Metamucil. (Shameless influencer fairy clap).

We’re a bit funny about poo in general, Australians. Back in Covid times, we developed a dystopian-level case of ‘hamsterkauf’; the delightful German word for panic hoarding. Coronavirus is a lung infection, not a gastro-intestinal illness, so symptoms are unlikely to occur south of the belly-button, but even when a fortnight’s possible quarantine and accompanying nervous diarrhoea were factored into the equation, the masses of loo roll being carted home were clearly excessive.

‘This isn’t Thunderdome,’ said Bankstown Police Area Commands’ Acting Inspector Andrew New, as he discussed the case of two women arrested for fighting in a Sydney supermarket’s toilet paper aisle back in those wild days. Police dealing with a similar incident in Tamworth, NSW had to Taser the bog-roll-brawlers.

Are we at the cusp of a new era, one wonders, where the poo-taboo is busted completely and we relieve ourselves, like good-natured Staffies, whenever the urge should strike, staring each other dead in the eye throughout? Is some epoch of New Vulgarity approaching, a future in which Tik Tokers snap and post their offerings, using shades-of-beige filters and poo-tuning apps to best display their faeces against red brick walls? Will this be the Max Max dystopia that Inspector New cautioned us against so long ago?

Maybe the Covid toilet paper wars and the phenomenon of poo-jogging are emblematic of our most selfish, prurient and juvenile collective character traits, as we humans seem to be intent on Benjamin-Buttoning our own cultural development, getting stupider by the year.

Maybe when one cannot control wider, more terrifying forces at play, like end-stage capitalism, the collapse of democracy, climate change and Love Island; it is comforting to revert to looking after our most simple and primitive needs. Wiping our botties. Looking at pictures in the paper of other peoples botties. There, there Australia. There, there.

I feel for Kath’s new notoriety. I feel for the lady at #32 having to clean up that regular plop as she pops out for milk. I feel for all of us trying hard to cope with the large and small moments of the day.

Let’s try and maintain in the coming year, comrades. Let’s hold steady, poo in the designated areas, and have compassion for those who can’t. We listen, and we don’t judge.

Next edition: back to the ADHD files! (Did I say that last time? Blame my underactive left inferior orbital prefrontal cortex! )

Ten Good Things

1. God bless Nagi at Recipe Tin Eats who has become such an Aussie staple that the joke at Xmas was the nationwide recipe-off between her and Ottolenghi. (Slab cheesecake was a winner, but the tomato and pomegranate salad will always remind me of Mum. )

2. Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, a well-made, jaw-dropping true-story.

3. Girl, Falling by Hayley Scrivenor: inhaled it.

4. Nougat Honey Log which leads to Jokabokaflod, the Norwegian Xmas tradition of giving a book and a chocolate on Xmas Eve. Nougat Honey Log has been choc of choice for many a year now.

5. Zoe Foster Blake’s Things Are Going To Calm Down, a cracking read.

6. A relisten to the excellent pod Phoebes Fall

7. A summer vibes playlist containing all 60s and 70s rock.

8. The impeccable Elizabeth Stroud’s writing in Anything is Possible.

9. A wild wedding dance floor, the oldest of besties, and a hot Melbourne night.

   

10. Mentor writing project for 2025: no more queries - all three spots are taken, and I’m looking forward to it!