I hope that’s a jacket spud in your trousers, Mary! | Steve Canavan

We live close to a very picturesque park, designed in the 1800s by someone vaguely famous, which features a fountain, a pond where swans and ducks congregate, and beautifully manicured gardens and flowers. But no matter how lovely something is, when you visit it for 84 days in a row it does start to get a tad tiresome.

We were doing our usual tour of the park, my daughter whizzing ahead on her scooter, me sprinting to try and keep up with her and, whenever someone else came towards us, shouting, ‘stay on the left side of the path Mary’.

Anyway we reached the statue where we play the statue game – I have to stand stock still in a weird pose while she pretends to admire this ‘new’ statue that has appeared.

So I stood on one leg and pointed to the sky and waited for her to arrive. She got fairly close and then stopped. I was looking upward, in my statue pose, so didn’t have eye contact with her. The one thing about the statue game is that you can’t move, obviously, so I stood there for at least 30 seconds wondering why she wasn’t coming any nearer.

Eventually I broke my pose, looked at a strangely quiet and subdued Mary and said, ‘are you okay?’

She responded with the words every parent dreads to hear when outside and a mile from home … ‘Daddy, I’ve done a poo’.

Now I’m aware this is not an unusual thing for parent to have to deal with, but it came as quite a shock because since potty training our daughter about a year ago, she has only had two accidents, both wees in pants, which, you know, is kind of fine.

Never before had she done the other type and I was momentarily at a loss as to what to do.

‘Are you sure?’ I asked. Instantly she replied, ‘yes, I’ve done a poo’.

As I walked towards her, enabling me to see the back of her trousers, there was no doubting her words, for there was a lump about the size of a large jacket potato in her bottom area.

I could think of nothing other to do than, carrying Mary’s scooter in one hand and her in the other, head towards a nearby tree that offered at least a little privacy. Against the trunk – and with several people tucking into their homemade sandwiches on nearby benches – I pulled down her trousers and knickers to discover something so large and horrifically smelling that it was difficult to believe a child of such a small size could produce it.

I frantically searched my pockets and found two tiny sheets of toilet paper which I used to scoop the volleyball-sized excrement out of my daughter’s knickers.

Fortunately it was quite firm but I now had to think what to do with what I was holding.

Fortunately, I discovered in the back pocket of my jeans a sandwich bag containing some biscuits I’d bought for Mary. Tossing the biscuits aside, I put her poo in the bag, as well as the kickers, which were beyond saving.

I then – and this was a low moment – had to walk around 40 metres through the park, past at least a dozen people, holding a child’s poo in a transparent sandwich bag, before plopping (no pun intended) it in the bin.

Those who’d witnessed the incident looked at me like I was the most disgusting specimen they’d ever come across. But, hey, what’s a man supposed to do? I looked at them in what I hoped was an apologetic manner, said in that fantastically English look-on-the-bright-side kind of way, ‘beautiful day isn’t it?’. Dragging Mary behind me, we exited at some speed.

Since then I have made sure, on our daily outings, to take with me several sheets of kitchen roll, a spare set of child’s undergarments, and a non-transparent bag. You never know when disaster might strike again.