Coming up like a blister in the sun, there has been an outbreak of syphilis in Dunedin, but not where you think. Much has been said about the skank queen promiscuity of Otago’s student population, after all the term Walk of Shame was coined here. However, while Chlamydia levels in Dunners are for sure higher than literacy ones, this time its not the poxy students who are inflaming the masses. No, the residents of South Dunedin are to blame. That, and sheer laziness.

Wait, I’ll explain. Last Thursday I was on a plane to Auckland, seated next to me was a woman who works for New Zealand’s biggest drug company. We got talking. She travels our fair isles supplying various medications, one of her speciality lines being syphilis medication. Pockets of this mind-rotting pox are popping up all over the country, especially in Blenheim, where a lack of other entertainment, good-looking itinerant vineyard workers and warm nights have apparently done their Bacchanalian worst. This came as a surprise to me, wasn’t syphilis one of those diseases last conquered in Napoleonic times? Yes, and No. Creepily, it has made a comeback, oozing like yellow peril into Dunedin thanks to internet dating and laziness.

Yes, laziness is the bane (or burn) of our cold Presbyterian city’s genitals. The residents of South Dunedin, online dating in search of a ‘date’ (quick unromantic shag) are too lazy to travel further than a couple of streets away for sex, explained the drug rep. As these sexual encounters also involve lots of alcohol (the residents of South Dunedin being for the most part squat and hirsute with poor dental hygiene) they don’t want to risk driving while already disqualified and neither do they want to ever see this person again. So, pockets of complete-stranger-sex are popping up like asparagus spears in the Google map grids and intersects of South Dunedin’s parallel streets, once laid out so lovingly by the town forefathers over reclaimed swampland, now a fetid bonk field. As much as Otago’s puritanical early settlers felt any emotions, and their portraits suggest otherwise, there’s no way they’d be happy about the clappy.

Like warty cauliflower clusters, lazy, syphilitic Don Juans are busy satisfying their burning desires, provided its within an easy stroll of home. Deciding to never repeat the experience means they avoid the fallout from their clap-riddled appendages. Boom! Instant outbreak. 

Now comes the funny (strange not ha ha ) part. The Dunedin sexual health clinic is charged with controlling this mini-pandemic before the vital parts of our nation’s supermarket shelf stockers and white van drivers are permanently pustulated. This involves tracking down the source, let’s call him Rick. ‘Hello? Is Rick there?’ They enquire at Rick’s work. ‘Anyone there had sex with Rick?’ Soon it becomes obvious that something is wrong with Rick’s dick. Rick might be sick. He is removed from Fish dispatch. But don’t worry too much about Rick, that prick, for the first time in his life he is in illustrious company, Paul Gaugin and Henri de Toulouse Lautrec both had syphilis, mind you so did Adolf Hitler and Ivan the Terrible. The moral of the story, you ask? Internet Dating Can be Dangerous or maybe Laziness is Rash.