Most of us walk around carrying a heavy burden of existential woe. Whenever my children, especially the belligerent university pair, grumble about the pittance of an allowance this starving columnist can afford to disburse to them, I always quote the 1897 Methodist hymn Count Your Blessings. This is usually followed by a pity party in which I explain that my monthly allowance in my first year of university was a mere R150.
In other words, whatever troubles you have, make sure you count your blessings. For instance, be thankful you’re not one Dr Andrew Neil Hopper, a UK vascular surgeon. The Guardian newspaper this past Thursday reported that Hopper had been found guilty of defrauding his insurance company after he claimed the cost of having both his legs amputated. He alleged his limbs had gone septic when in fact he’d orchestrated their severance to satisfy a sexual fetish.
Let me pause here and let you wipe up the coffee that just spurted out of your nostrils before I explain that Hopper froze both his lower legs in dry ice until they were so damaged they needed to be amputated — just so he could get off sexually.
Now I’m not judging anyone. I respect the diverse range of human sexuality just as much as the next guy. Some men like to be spanked by their wife when she’s all dressed up in a nun’s habit. Other folks get breathless at the thought of engaging in Clark Kent and Lois Lane role plays. American rapper Diddy is in jail right now for sordid acts involving enough baby oil to lubricate the entire US Air Force fleet. It’s all part of the vast array of human sexual expression in all its garish glory.
If your jaw is not on the floor right now, you’re made of sterner stuff than I, because there were veritable scrape marks on my chin after I picked it up from where it had fallen
However, even if your repertoire is as “vanilla” as the average Tuesday-night scrum in the Ngcobo household, you can still hold your head high and be proud of your efforts.
Now that we’ve established that no-one’s doing any judging here, let’s get back to our amputee fetishist from a certain rain-sodden little island. I have so many questions about this story. Hopper seems to have been a regular visitor to the pornographic website EunuchMaker, which, according to The Guardian, was responsible for promoting all manner of “extreme body modifications”, including amputations consistent with the name of the site. If your jaw is not on the floor right now, you’re made of sterner stuff than I, because there were veritable scrape marks on my chin after I picked it up from where it had fallen.
I’ve been asking myself the same question over and over again since I read this article: why? Hopper made off with almost £500,000 (about R12m) after his insurance claim scam, in addition to the presumably intense and satisfying orgasms he experienced pursuant to his chop-chop activities. So what did he spend the loot on? The answer to this question offers troubling insights into the workings of this man’s mind. The list of his purchases includes a wood burner, a camper van and a hot tub. This is such a banal collection of items one is left struggling to comprehend just what the motivation for his grisly antics was.
Once again, I hope that reading this column has made you count your blessings. Whatever troubles you’re going through, at least you’re not a double amputee about to spend 32 months in prison without his wood burner and hot tub. At least you won’t be sharing a cell with some crazed, yellow-toothed psychopath waving his legs in front of your face and saying, “For £50, I’ll saw one off to get you off!”
The Guardian article has also made me wonder about the sorts of things people around me are getting up to for pleasure. For example, I was at Checkers yesterday when I espied a couple — a large, tattooed bald guy in a leather biker waistcoat together with a tiny yellow-haired woman with piercings all over her face — in the queue. I couldn’t help but wonder whether the six pineapples in their trolley had anything to do with the story I’d just read.
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