A Mystery Shitter Has Declared War on a Cornwall Swimming Pool

​ Someone keeps shitting in a pool in Falmouth, Cornwall so hard that a weekly children's disco is in danger of being cancelled. Let that sink in, so to speak. Someone shat. Repeatedly. In a pool. So much so that a children's weekly disco has had to be cancelled.

Sometimes I think about what I have achieved in life – very little, on the whole, because my core skill is "writing words", and any dumb goof can do that – and I think: yes, but has one of my turds ever stopped a party from happening? The answer is no. The mystery Falmouth shitter can claim that boast, and the saddest thing is we'll probably never know his or her name.

As the Western Morning News reports, the Ships and Castles Leisure Centre in Falmouth has been the target of a persistent "logger" (their words – is this health and safety terminology? Let me know if you know, I'm genuinely interested) who drops shits in the pool during the kids' water disco, Rave Wave.

Apparently the person – or person s, thinking about it; it could be an organised turd gang – has been waiting for the lights to dim, for the Calvin Harris album to come on shuffle, for the kids to start raving, and then just, like: doing a big floating jobby. Every week for weeks.

It's getting so bad that the leisure firm behind the centre, Tempus, is considering cancelling the weekly event. "It seems a customer is purposely defecating in our centre," a spokesperson said. "The customer being one of the children aged between eight years and 14 years old attending the session.

"I would like to assure our customers this poses no health and safety threat to other members of the public using our facility. Our water is treated by ultra violet light and we use chlorine as a further measure of disinfection."

What worries me is: Can chlorine stop a turd bobbing towards you as though it is laser guided and then popping into your mouth while you attempt to get your breathing down while doing the butterfly? Because I don't think chlorine can do that. Or ultraviolet light. And that personally puts me off Rave Waving in the near future.

But more importantly, all evidence seems to indicate that the phantom logger is actually a human child between the ages of 8 and 14, rather than an adult sprinting out under the cover of darkness and – off a diving board – shitting into the pool. Which begs probably more questions that it answers, such as: What kind of child has the focus and determination for such a sustained, long-running shittery campaign? How are they able to shit on command like that; do they save it up, in full knowledge that they will be in a swimming pool later that day when the lights go down? And also why? Why would you do that?

At my primary school, on a week-long trip to London that I did not attend because my parents were poor, a kid called Robert was discovered to have a pair of especially shat-in pants in his possession. Don't ask me how or why kids were looking at the state of his gusset; I do not know, I was back home kicking a ball against a wall while substitute teachers tried to make me interested in maths. What matters was the nickname he came back home with, which was "Skidmark", and has followed him from the junior playground all the way up to this day. In a way, I think it ruined his life. Ol' Skiddy Robert and his big ol' ruined life.

But the point is that kids hate shits as much as we do. Kids don't think doing a log in a pool is cool. If they ever find the Falmouth shitter, and it's identified as being one of their classmates, the aforementioned shitter might as well move country. There's no getting your reputation back after that. Children are cruel, and I could see why you might want to menacingly shit near them, but think of your reputation, Falmouth Pool Shitter. Think of your future.

​@joelgolby

Read more about shit:

​All Aboard the UK's First Shit-Powered Bus

​You Don't Know Shit, a Documentary About Shit

​Meet a Professional Poo Diver