You are inflamed. Of course you are. You have been eating eggs, sitting in a draught and failing to walk briskly since August, and your body has had enough. Sit still. No, stiller. This week you will undertake the Lower Tract Reset, a ten-day detox in which you will insert one raw native oyster, sourced from Dellboy Finch of Whitstable, into your rectum and hold it there for twenty minutes. You will not enjoy this. That is the point. I can see you reading this at 11.40pm with a biscuit, and I am not impressed.
By Tuesday the MP for Faversham had signed up
Within four days, 1,900 people had subscribed to my Substack, The Lower Tract, and committed to the protocol. The subscriber list, leaked to the Faversham Gazette, includes a sitting MP, a deputy chief constable from Cumbria, and a woman who runs a wellness retreat in Frome. Dellboy Finch told the paper he has taken on two extra shuckers and is working until 1am to meet demand.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Mr Finch, Oyster Merchant, Whitstable. “People are coming in asking for natives, room temperature, no lemon. I don’t ask questions. I just shuck.”
I posted a photograph of my own kitchen counter, ten oysters lined up like ammunition, with the caption: “Day 1. Walked to the coast. Ate no egg.”
The Royal College of Surgeons said it has never been taught
The Royal College of Surgeons issued a two-paragraph statement describing the technique as having no evidence base, never having been taught at any UK medical school, and being inadvisable for anyone with a history of diverticulitis. NHS England circulated a memo to trust communications teams on the Friday, advising staff not to remove oysters from A&E patients unless the patient is febrile, and to record the oyster as “foreign body, dietary”.
“We are aware of the protocol and we are not endorsing it,” said a spokesperson for the Royal College of Surgeons. “We would remind the public that the rectum is not a bivalve habitat.”
A registrar at Frimley Park wrote in the incident log that a patient had arrived with a laminated card explaining the protocol and asked staff to respect it.
Sales of native oysters in Kent rose by 340 per cent
The British Oyster Board reported a 340 per cent rise in native oyster sales across Kent and Essex, and denied any commercial arrangement with me, calling me “a customer, like anyone else”. Two participants were hospitalised, one at Frimley Park with a shell fragment lodged near the sigmoid colon, and one at Ninewells in Dundee after inserting two in error. My only public comment was that both had failed to walk briskly, and that the fragment is a sign the body is “finally listening”. I did not mention eggs, which was noted.
“The fragment is doing what the fragment is doing,” I said, in a statement read by my assistant. “The body is a system. The system is responding. Walk more. Eat less egg. Do not write to me before 10am.”
Day 10 arrived with a langoustine announcement
By Day 10, the subscriber count stood at 11,000 and Mr Finch had sold out of natives until November. I published a photograph of myself on a shingle beach, announced the protocol was complete, and immediately announced the follow-up: fourteen days of live langoustines, one per day, held for forty minutes, with the reader instructed to “maintain eye contact” with the langoustine. I added that participants should continue to walk briskly and reduce egg intake to zero.
“The langoustine is the obvious one,” I said. “It has legs. It is a step up. The oyster was a foundation. The langoustine is the house.”
Asked by the Gazette whether I accept any responsibility for the hospitalisations, I said I have never met these people and do not expect to, and that the reader should not contact me before 10am because I am walking.
