Funny Brits

I should be ashamed of this, but while perusing today's news, the headline "Riddle of the Czech Beauty Without a Belly Button" caught my eye. I clicked, I read, and the article wasn't as interesting as I thought.

But then what delighted me was reading the comments at the end of the article. These Brits are rather amusing, for the most part.

Take Riv from High Wycombe:

"I too was short-changed a navel at birth; although to this day I have no idea why. I suspect being born three months premature via caesarean section may have meant the tissue was pliable enough to gently set into a mild indentation. Any doctors out there who can confirm? I used to tell people I was grown in a vat... Still, no belly-button fluff."

"A vat." Funny stuff. Or Darren Jalland, from Larbert, Scotland:

"I lost my belly button after abdominal surgery five years ago. I've found it very useful on training session icebreakers when we are asked for an unusual fact about ourselves, although I often have to prove it."

Some comments were educational, telling about all sorts of procedures people have had which resulted in the loss of their belly button or other famous people who are sans navel.

Others were a bit gross. Conor from Dublin:

"My dogs have no belly buttons, because their mothers gently chewed the wound from the umbilical chord, and licked them while they were healing. She continued doing so until there was virtually no scar from birth."

But Bill Hunt's comment made me yell "WHAT?" after I read it, which is saying a lot. I'm a pretty mild-mannered person.

"Sixty years ago I was house-surgeon to a London surgeon, a real Lancelot Spratt character. He thought the umbilicus was a nasty dirty place and when operating on anyone's abdomen he would, without permission or consultation, cut it out. My job was to invent some story to tell the patient why it had been necessary. How times have changed."