"And then he said..."

Of all the undignified ways to shuffle off this mortal coil, getting sucked into bottomless mud while clearing litter in your local park has got to rank right up there.

Which makes my misadventure yesterday, when I found myself sinking fast into the bed of a misleadingly inoffensive stream that I’ve known since childhood, all the more embarrassing.

Once a month, Beloved Other Half and I head down to the nearest large park to join a litter clear-up organised by one of our neighbours.

Usually it’s just a case of scouring the park boundaries, the edges of the footpaths and the area around the skateboard ramps, using council-provided pickers - blue plastic claws with long handles - and black bin bags.

Two dedicated chaps from the Green Party usually take care of recovering beer cans from a pond off at the far end and bicycles from the river that runs along one boundary, providing a home to moorhens, water voles and (inevitably) rats.

But yesterday neither of them came, so me and Beloved Other Half got to play in the water instead.

As the photo shows, it’s really not a deep stream at all. The bed is a mix of hard sand and shingle on the fast bends, with a couple of inches of soft mud overlaying it in the quieter stretches.

So we made good progress, fishing out one bicycle and filling two bin-bags with cans, chocolate wrappers and endless waterlogged packaging from loaves of bread, presumably dumped by people who had finished feeding the ducks.

Marching along the stream bed, separated from our colleagues working elsewhere, hidden from the park on one side and the road on the other by high banks, it was easy to forget we were in a town. All rather idyllic, actually, apart from the litter.

Where it went pear-shaped was when I decided to take advantage of a break in the vegetation on the opposite bank to get out, regroup and maybe cash in my bin-bag for an empty one.

A few paces towards the middle, the stream bed got a lot softer. A couple more and suddenly my right boot was full of water. I shifted my weight onto my left leg to retreat, felt that one start to sink too, went back onto my right, and immediately that leg was knee-deep in the mud.

Twisting round to call out to Beloved Other Half turned out to be a bad idea - although I was able to keep my left foot from going more than a couple inches into the mud, my right started sinking further.

I was going down into the mud, and I didn’t know how far I’d go before I stopped - or even, for a horrible few seconds, whether I’d stop at all.

I did, of course. I was crouching on my left leg with my right in the mud all the way up to my thigh and water lapping around my unmentionables, but I’d stopped sinking.

Hadn’t a clue how to get out, though.

Beloved Other Half came over to help, but started sinking herself before she could pull me upwards. And when she stayed a safer distance away and pulled laterally all that happened was that she ended up on her hands and knees in the water.

I had visions of a humiliating rescue by the Fire Brigade, followed by an equally embarrassing jokey piece in the local paper that would have made a muddy grave the preferable choice.

Beloved Other Half, meanwhile, was taking advantage of the fact that I was plainly not going anywhere to dump all the bin-bags and litter-pickers on or near the bank - a couple of times so far we’d come close to the lot floating away downstream, shedding rubbish as they went.

Eventually, I hit on a plan that worked. I was stable enough in the mud by now to be able to bounce up and down on the toes of my right foot without anything too bad happening. This broke the suction and gave me a shot at getting free.

Beloved Other Half pulled and the right leg (complete with boot, to my surprise) started to emerge even as the left started to sink because of the shifting of the weight. Not a problem - I had enough momentum to keep moving and stop it sticking, and soon I was on the bank, with evil-smelling black gunge slopping out of my boots.

After that, it was the devil’s own job to get them off - much comical huffing and puffing and tugging while lying by the side of a main road - followed by a quick (and probably unnecessary, given what we looked like) conversation with one of the volunteers, explaining why we leaving, and a barefoot walk home, clutching our dripping wellies.

Then tea, hot shower, more tea and a solicitous visit from the organiser to check I was OK - which I was, part utterly freaked out by the suddenness of it all, part embarrassed by the sheer silliness of it.

Any real danger? No, probably not - all pretty trivial, really, now it’s over. But the moment of eye-popping terror when one leg was gone, and for all I knew the other was about to follow it, will not be quickly forgotten.

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It was a bad buttock night tonight at the gym.

There's an etiquette to men's changing rooms in England, quite different to the one I found when I was in Iceland. It may, thinking about it, have evolved from what you did at school when you were changing after games lessons and knew you'd get chased into the shower by a hairy rugby teacher if you didn't shed your childish inhibitions and get your kit off quickly. (Unlike school days, however, it's not the done thing when you're an adult to roll your towel into a tight whip and slash at your fellow changers' legs as they skitter past.)

The approved way of acting is to ignore the other chap's clothing status. If you walk in, kitbag on shoulder, to get changed and spot the fellow you thrashed at squash last week, you simply nod a manly hello, just as if you'd spotted him across the street. You do this irrespective of whether he is fully dressed, stalking back damply from the shower clutching a towel in front of him, or wearing a jacket and tie from the waist up and stark bollock naked from the waist down.

Now, it so happens that I don't know anyone at the club (I'm more likely to play in the traffic than play squash) so I don't need to worry about that aspect of things. I just have to remember the etiquette for my own nudity. This boils down, basically, to one maxim: be cool.

Wrap a towel around you when you're walking to and from the showers, by all means, but if you're too fat or the towel's too small just hold it casually in front of you. Flaunting the fact you're hung like a donkey is a social faux pas, but indulging in desperate contortions to hide yourself is, frankly, just as embarrassing. And buttocks are just buttocks - not worth disguising at all.

Of course, there's an undercurrent to all this studied nonchalence. Or rather, two undercurrents. One can best be expressed as “is he fatter than me?”. The other is, of course, “is my dick bigger than his?”. I shan't comment on my position in these two great debates (you all know I'm overweight anyway), instead I'll just sit here and smile enigmatically. One doesn't stare, of course, but you can learn an awful lot in the split second between noticing the figure in the corner of your eye has dropped his shorts and finding a legitimate and entirely coincidental reason to be facing the other direction. And if the naked figure is waddling out of the showers, and you're heading off to use them yourself, then you'll be practically in a position to produce an anatomical drawing by the time you get past him, despite your best intentions to treat him like your bank manager.

So, a typically English solution - lots of unspoken rules to regulate a potentially embarrassing situation. No-one ever tells you them, you just grow up knowing them. The trouble comes when someone appears who doesn't know them, or doesn't care about them.

Some days ago I was returning from the showers, daydreaming vacantly, and turned the corner to the seat closest to the locker where my clothes were. At first I wasn't sure what I was looking at, so unexpected was the vision that appeared in front of me. And then it snapped horribly into focus. Two very large, very white, very hairy, very wobbly buttocks thrust upwards to the sky as the owner bent forward to dry one of his feet - a foot he'd placed up on the seat I'd been planning to use. I beat a hasty retreat.

Not long after, I found myself drying my hair next to one of the club's few blatant exhibitionists. My secret vice is that I like to use the hairdryer there - with my barnet the length it is at the moment, attacking it with a hairdryer gives me the ludicrously bouffant locks of a WWE wrestler. This guy looked like a wrestler too - he was obviously born to be a snarling bad guy, the sort of wrestler who is basically triangular with shoulders that won't fit through the door and a body that tapers down past endless perfectly-defined muscles to a washboard-flat stomach. In this guy's case, once you got there a tattoo declared ominously “Only God can judge me”. He stood in front of the mirror, twisting this way and that as he teased his close-cut hair and examined his muscles from all angles. He wore no shirt and his jeans were artfully undone, staying round his waist in direct defiance of the law of gravity, the fly open far enough to allow the bulge in his underpants to be on full display. And you know what they say about bodybuilders on steroids? Either it's not true, or this guy's clean as a whistle.

But these events took place a few days ago. So why did I start this post by saying it was a bad buttock night?

Well, I was sat down shortly before leaving, putting my shoes on, when I chanced to look up. There in front of my eyes, close enough to bite, was a pair of buttocks. They were so close that I could have easily stuck out a finger and - well, anyway, you get the picture. The owner, I think, didn't know the rules. I was sitting directly in front of his locker, he needed something from within it (his underpants, hopefully), so he went and opened it, ignoring the effect on me, sitting there at cheek level. Now, I like a shapely pair of buttocks as much as the next man, but there are limits. I felt like tapping him politely on the shoulder and saying 'now look here, old chap, this simply isn't on'.

I mean, if anyone's going to stick their arse in my face like that, I expect at the very least to be taken to dinner first…

As a general rule, I like to waft gently through life in a pleasant sort of daze, without thinking too deeply about anything. I find this approach can generally be relied upon to reduce stress levels, although it was something of a disadvantage during my former career as a politician.

Regular readers will know that from time to time I can be a jolly deep sort of cove, fully capable of piercing analytical thought. But most of the time I prefer to write about toasters.

Today, to my increasing distress, the world has conspired to make me consider my place in the universe. Not 20 minutes ago Beloved Other Half, in a fit of high dudgeon induced by my near-terminal vagueness, demanded of me “what is the point of you?”

This was not a conundrum I felt equipped to tackle, but fortunately it was intended as a rhetorical device and I decided at once that an attempt to provide an answer would not be welcomed.

Not so the incident at lunch, when I paused over my noodles to see a hovering waiter with an unusual thorn-like thing stuck through his ear-lobe smiling encouragingly at me.

I performed a quick mental rewind, dragging the words he had just spoken up from whatever murky depths of my subconscious they were sinking into, and replayed them.

He had said: “Are you happy?”

Well, I ask you. What sort of a question is that to sling at a chap over a bowl of miso soup?

“Yes - as far as I'm aware - thank you,” was my cautious and rather startled reply, at which point he grinned broadly and bounced off to be cheerful somewhere else.

As he disappeared he fired a parting shot over his shoulder: “Oh! What a big question that was!”

Quite. It really is all too much.