M A T T . T H O R N E : E I G H T . M I N U T E S . I D L E

This is the only major edit I made to Eight Minutes Idle. I've included the
paragraph just before the extract (in square brackets) so this section makes
sense. It's from page 8:

[On the wall inside is a poster of a white-haired professor holding up a
conical flask of urine. He's gazing admiringly at the golden fluid, with the
word Eureka! printed alongside his mouth. A second poster shows a tribe of
gorillas. Each gorilla holds a bottled sample. There is no caption. I can
see why the professor is funny, but the primates perplex me. Are they
holding their own urine? Are they supposed to represent doctors? Patients?
Or is the joke more subtle, based on the odd juxtaposition.] I used to have
a photographer friend who moved to Australia. He said he went there because
he was fed up of English people. But when he arrived he realised he'd had
enough of people full stop. Over the next few months he moved into
increasingly remote areas. Eventually he found himself living alone in a
trailer in the middle of nowhere. One morning while out exploring, he was
gripped by an urgent need to defecate. Before he'd had chance to think what
he was doing, he'd pulled down his trousers and shat on the ground. The heat
and his diet had unravelled his digestive system and his faeces shot out in a
wet black splat across the dry earth. Shocked by his instinctual action, he
took a polaroid of the mess he had made. Looking through his pictures while
hiding under a wet sheet to cope with the bloodboiling heat of the afternoon,
he decided this was the most beautiful, important picture he had ever taken,
and posted it to his brother in London, asking him to place it with a
magazine. Although he received no reply, my friend was convinced he'd made a
psychological breakthrough that would change the way he took pictures
forever. He knew he wasn't the first person to experiment with bodily
fluids, and it wasn't the concept of fashioning art from excrement that
excited him, but rather that for the first time he'd come to terms with his
own physical reality through a photograph. Eager to continue his
exploration, he began every morning by urinating into small glass bottles and
leaving them to precipitate on his windowsill. When his brother arrived to
rescue him, he refused to abandon his objects d'art and ran out into the sun
with the samples balanced in his arms. My friend told me this anecdote with
a faraway look in his eyes, as if it was a project he felt eager to return
to. I knew he'd love these posters, and that the gorilla joke would make
perfect sense to him.