15 Oct 2020

You knew it was coming, didn’t you? I’ve written about poo before, so this was always going to be on the cards…

Apparently in the UK a man who got into a fight with an Uber driver after farting in the car, has had his case thrown out of court. Expelled from court, as it were.

Now I didn’t read the article about this case much beyond the headline, to be frank, but it was enough to give me a little bit of sympathy for the Uber driver – the fartee of the story – but also for the farter.

The line or two I read of the article said the Uber driver reacted badly to the farter after suffering abuse from other passengers, and ordered the farter to get out of the vehicle.

To be fair, a fart in an enclosed car is quite often hard to deal with, but surely the ‘windows down’ option is always first emergency response. Anyone who has travelled in the car with my dog will know that there are occasions when, no matter what the weather is doing outside the car, there will be occasions when all four windows are fully open until everything can breathe again.

But from the point of view of the farter, unless he has amazing control of his sphincter, sometimes they just happen. We all do it – even girls, albeit not in the same competitive and proud manner that males generally employ in the process.

Of course, because it’s expected of me, I researched farting. Not the actual act, of course – although apparently we all have between 0.5 to 1.5 litres of gas in our bowels, which is expelled during the day in an average of 20 times a day.

But farting appears in a few annals of history (geddit??). Apparently Hitler had a problem with uncontrollable farting, and in 569BC a single fart sparked a revolt against King Apries of Egypt. A fart in Jerusalem in 44AD led to the deaths of 10,000 people, and in 1607 a British politician farted during a debate about naturalising the Scots. Must have been a good one to have passed into folklore. Oh and the Guinness book of records has the longest fart at 2 minutes, 42 seconds. Be glad you’re not in an Uber with that bloke (not being sexist – it was a male!).

Benjamin Franklin once wrote an essay called “Fart Proudly”, which was distributed to friends but never published.

So fart proudly folks, but not in a Uber. And don’t get into a competition with the males of my family, who are all definitely in the 1.5 litres of wind category, or with my dog, who although she has a much smaller amount of wind passing through, it definitely packs a lot of punch.