Pubic Topiary and Why It Is Good For You

There must have been booze involved, because I can think of no other reason that my flatmate and I would have started discussing our pubic grooming.
“Of course I trim it,” he said. “You don’t?”
“Not at all!” I replied truthfully, somewhat discombobulated. Was this something every guy did, some life lesson that I had skipped? Had my unkempt pubes upset those who had seen them? Or was he just a bit gay?
“Do unto others,” he said, or words to that effect, pointing out that few people find Ewoks sexy, so maybe a trim was in order.
Feeling the need for outside opinion, I asked my friend Sadie whether it was something women expected. “Keep whatever style you want,” was her reply, “as long as the foliage does not obscure the fruit.”
The truth is that I am almost entirely hairless over most of my body, but my pits and the down-there hair overcompensate. Even with my arms folded it looks like a wombat is trying to escape from under them, and if my knicker elastic loosens it appears that Diana Ross is trying to escape my pants.
So I took a pair of nail scissors and ever so carefully started trimming. With no skill or experience in the area it soon appeared that I had genital mange, and I snipped further and more, then stopped, a little scared. There is an area just above the pokey part that I think of as Antwerp – it is not certainly in the Netherlands, but not the main bit. And in my Antwerp, just off center, there was a large dark spot. I have many freckles, some of which are dark and ominous. But this was too big to be considered a mole. It was more like an otter.
“What seems to be the problem?” a doctor asked when I had finally mustered the courage to visit one.
“I have an otter in Antwerp.” I answered, then in response to the doc’s obvious bafflement, explained about the mole but not how it was that it came to be discovered.
“Hmm,’ the doctor said, like the bastard he undoubtedly was, then ‘Hmmm,” again. “That’s not a problem,” he said, then raised a finger and pointed at a spot just beneath my left eye, “but that is cancer.”
Cancer is not a word you ever want to hear. And I had it on my face. My pulse went up a notch, then two, and the doctor, who I may have mentioned was a bastard, said “But it is only a basal cell carcinoma. They don’t metastasize, and unless it spreads over your nostrils can’t kill you. Shall we cut it out?”
“Yes please bastard,” I said, but admittedly the last word was a wee bit more quietly said than the others, particularly as he now held a scalpel.
Being of Swedish descent and a life lived in the sun don’t go well together, and recently I have discovered another spot of cancer. It isn’t something that has me overly worried, but has made me value the advice of my friends who told me to trim. In fact, just for the occasions, I will get out the scissors.